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Fans of Macy’s Inc. will be disappointed to learn that the iconic department store has announced its next round of store closures. Fourteen Macys locations in 12 states will shutter as a result of this move. Heres why and when the closures will take place. Whats happened? On Thursday, Macys published a letter from CEO Tony Spring to its employees updating them on the companys A Bold New Chapter strategy, which the department store chain unveiled in February 2024. As part of that strategy, Macys announced at the time that it would be closing 150 underproductive stores through the end of 2026. Fast Company previously reported on 66 stores marked for closure in January 2025. In his Thursday letter, Spring said that the Bold New Chapter strategy, which includes simplifying operations and investing in customer experiences that its shoppers value most, is working. We are seeing customers respond through strong performance in our go-forward business, record Net Promoter Scores, and improved results over the first three quarters, Spring stated. As a point used to highlight the A Bold New Chapters success, Spring said that the strategys Reimagine element, which is seeing Macys invest in 125 of its best-performing stores, was paying off. Those stores saw comparative sales grow 2.7% in the third quarter, which Spring said was the result of investment in those stores elevated merchandising, store design, and customer experience. Unfortunately for some Macys employees, Spring also confirmed that the next round of store closures is beginning now. How many Macys stores are closing? Springs memo confirmed that Macys will close additional stores. Axios reported earlier that 14 stores that are closing in this round, and those store locations have also been marked with the notation This location is closing on Macys store locator tool. The 14 stores are believed to be part of the 150 locations Macys previously said would close by the end of 2026 as part of its A Bold New Chapter strategy. When will the Macy’s stores close? In a FAQ about the store closures, Macys says the stores impacted will begin their clearance sales this month, and those sales will go on for approximately 10 weeks. That places the closing date for these 14 locations at around the third week in March. “These decisions are not made lightly,” Spring said in his letter. “We communicated directly with affected colleagues first and are providing support, including transfer opportunities where available, as well as severance and outplacement resources where applicable. Which Macys stores are closing? Fourteen Macys stores will be closing in this round. Those 14 stores are located in 12 states. Fast Company has reached out to Macy’s to confirm. The stores include: California Grossmont Center: 5500 Grossmont Center Drive, La Mesa, CA 91942 West Valley Mall: 3200 Naglee Rd, Tracy, CA 95304 Georgia Northlake Mall: 4880 Briarcliff Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30345 Maryland Marley Station: 7900 Ritchie Highway, Glen Burnie, MD 21061 Michigan Rivertown Crossings: 3850 Rivertown Parkway SW, Grandville, MI 49418 Minnesota Crossroads Center: 4101 West Division Street, St Cloud, MN 56301 New Hampshire Fox Run: 50 Fox Run Road, Newington, NH 03801 New Jersey Livingston Mall: 112 Eisenhower Parkway, Livingston, NJ 07039 Interstate Shopping Center: 225 Interstate Shopping Center, Ramsey, NJ 07446 New York Boulevard Mall: 1255 Niagara Falls Boulevard, Amherst, NY 14226 North Carolina Triangle Town Center: 3801 Sumner Boulevard, Raleigh, NC 27616 Pennsylvania Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills: 100 Pittsburgh Mills Cir, Tarentum, PA 15084 Texas La Palmera Mall: 5488 S Padre Island Dr Ste 5000. Corpus Christi, TX 78411 Washington Parkway Super Center: 17855 Southcenter Pkwy, Tukwila, WA 98188 How has Macys store reacted? Yesterday, when Macys published Springs letter, the companys stock price (NYSE: M) closed up for the day, around 5.5% to $23.72 per share. However, the gain in shares probably has little to do with the announcement of the closure of those 14 stores, as the company has long informed investors that it plans to close 150 locations by the end of this year. Instead, the share price gain was most likely driven by Spring’s comments about the companys 2.7% comp growth in its Reimagine stores and 9% comp sales growth in its Bloomingdales stores in the third quarter. With yesterdays share price jump, Macys shares are now up 7.57% for the year as of the time of this writing. Over the past 12 months, Macys shares have jumped nearly 48% and in the last few months have traded around levels not seen since January 2023.
Category:
E-Commerce
Welcome to the first Fast Companys Plugged In of 2026, and Happy New Year to you. More than 18 years ago, as the internet was transforming how we consume everything from news to music, someone called books the last bastion of analog. That someone happened to be Jeff Bezos. And he made the observation in a Steven Levy Newsweek article about Amazons original Kindle e-reader, a device designed to drag books into the digital age. Bezoss comment resurfaced in my consciousness last week, as I read a New York Times article by Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter on how the book publishing business fared in 2025. The upshot: It did pretty well overall, and remains a surprisingly analog enterprise. To be clear, the internet in generaland Amazon in particularhas transformed how we buy and consume books. Market share figures for booksellers are tough to come by, but estimates show the company controlling 50% or more of print book sales, leaving chains such as Barnes & Noble and independents to jostle for whats left. Thats before you account for e-books and audiobooks, where Amazons Kindle and Audible platforms are overwhelmingly dominant. Despite that, paper books remain popular, and many people choose to buy them at brick-and-mortar stores. As of mid-December, roughly three-quarters of the 707 million books sold last year were of the traditional, dead-tree variety. In the first 10 months, e-books accounted for only 11% of revenue, down from 17% in 2016. The American Booksellers Associations ranks swelled by 422 new shopsindependent ones, not chain operations. On top of that, we got dozens of new Barnes & Noble locations, with more on their way. All of that suggests that books in their classic form arent just running on fumes of nostalgia or consumer inertia. Much of whats delightful about the whole experience of engaging with the medium is inherently physical, in ways that other mediamusic, movies, newspapers, magazinesare not. I knew that a year ago when I declared that I was going to go out of my way to read dead-tree tomes in 2025, starting with the tower of them stacked on my nightstand. Taking the time to do so was a rewarding experience, and though life interfered with me reading as many as Id hoped, Im looking forward to continuing the quest in 2026 and beyond. As I wrote in that newsletter, Im hardly an e-book hater. Theyre often cheaper than print equivalents. They let you carry your entire library wherever you go. They can be easily searched. For nonfiction volumes being read for research purposesa meaningful chunk of my book consumptionthey beat print as the best overall format. Still, as I also wrote back then, e-books havent lived up to their full potential. Typographically and layout-wise, they remain rudimentary compared to paper. And even when they do things that print cant, they dont always do them well. Thats been my experience with a new AI-powered Kindle feature called Ask this book. Introduced last month for thousands of titles in the Kindle iPhone and iPad apps, it lets you use a chatbot-style interface to pose questions about a books contents. To avoid spoilers, it defaults to its answers reflecting only what youve read so far. The tool has proven controversial, in part because authors arent compensated and cant opt out. But when I tried it with my Kindle edition of Walter Isaacsons Steve Jobs, the big problem was that it was terrible. Its responses repeatedly mangled factual material, from the circumstances of Jobs time at Reed College to the year the iPod was introduced. They also failed to provide any citations, rendering them useless as entry points for additional reading within the e-book. Ask this book does have the potential to evolve into something more interesting and useful. But when it comes to the shopping experience, for both digital and print books, Amazon has been marching in the wrong direction for years. Author Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe how tech products tend to grow customer-hostile over time. In his new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he declares Amazon to have reached a terminal stage of the phenomenon. Indeed, the companys original taglineEarths biggest bookstorenow feels more like a threat than a promise. Even if you cut the company some slack for offering a shopping experience thats relentlessly utilitarian rather than intellectually stimulating, the place is in shambles. Search results are smothered with unrelated sponsored links and blatantly AI-generated junk books. Pages devoted to specific authors may be missing books, or, worse, list ones they didnt write. The search results for John Grisham started with a paperback copy of his 2002 novel The Summons for an absurd $51.76, with an estimated delivery turnaround of up to two weekseven though Amazon also has it for under 10 bucks with free Prime overnight shipping. For decades, the fact that local book shops couldnt compete with Amazons massive inventory seemed like an existential weakness. But the best ones curate their selections in ways that offer a powerful alternative to Amazons unedited sprawl. To my knowledge, no online merchant has replicated the artful serendipity of brick-and-mortar book browsing, where wandering the aisles and stumbling across stuff you never knew existed is part of the point, not a distraction. Recently, I did much of my holiday gift shopping at one of my favorite Bay Area bookstores, Menlo Parks Keplers. A large storebut not a completely enormous oneits a joy to get lost in. I didnt have to elbow my way past AI slop or sponsored chum, and emerged with a stack of books I would never have discovered through online shopping. Unlike Amazon, Keplers doesnt offer discounts off list price. Actually, it tacks on a small surcharge to pay its employees a living wage. I am happy to pay it. The 70-year-old store, which almost went out of business in 2005, doesnt feel like a relic. Instead, like every good bookstore, its an idea too vibrant to be rendered irrelevant by technology. Its heartening to think the publishing industry has settled into a groove that will keep such neighborhood gems viable for years to come. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompay.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Craiglist’s founder has some simple rules for not losing your mindor moneyon the internetCraig Newmark’s ‘Take9’ campaign asks people to pause nine seconds before reacting online. Read More LinkedIn is expanding its AI-powered job search featuresThe platform continues to grow as a hub for seeking jobs and holding professional discussions. Read More AI isn’t stealing your traffic. It’s stealing your authorityAs AI becomes the first stop for information, GEO is how you make sure your version of the story gets told. Read More Yann LeCun: Meta ‘fudged a little bit’ when benchmark-testing Llama 4 modelThe testing sparked internal frustration about the progress of the Llama models. Read More OpenAI enters the connected health space with ChatGPT HealthHealth is already a popular topic area on ChatGPT. OpenAI is now adding physician expertise, and plug-ins for health apps and records. Read More Tin Can phones have been overwhelmed since ChristmasThe company says it’s working to fix a network issue and that paying customers won’t be charged until the devices are reliable once more. Read More 12 CEOs share bold predictions for 2026Market corrections, the rise of sovereign AI, and the first AI-driven attack are among the bold predictions for the coming year. Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
One of Ikeas most popular lamps of the past several yearsnicknamed the donut lampis about to get a smart, colorful upgrade. The original donut lamp debuted back in 2023 as part of Ikeas 20-piece Varmblixt collection with the Rotterdam-based designer Sabine Marcelis. With its glossy orange glass and soft, retro glow, the lamp quickly emerged as a fan favorite: In the three years since its debut, Ikea says one donut lamp has sold every five minutes in the U.S. Its the companys best-selling lamp, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Given the lamps popularity, Ikea has teamed up with Marcelis for a new version, this time featuring a smart function that allows it to cycle through a curated palette of colors. The new donut lamp will be available for $99.99 starting in April, alongside a $149.99 color-changing version of a pendant lamp that also debuted as part of the original Varmblixt collection. [Photo: Ikea] The updated lamps come as Ikea is investing more into its smart products with a new range of easy-to-use bulbs, sensors, and smart plugs that debuted in November. Both the donut lamp and the pendant lamp are compatible with Ikeas smart home system hub, Dirigera, as well as Matter, the smart home technical standard that undergirds the rest of the companys smart home tech. This new integration signals that as smart systems become more central to Ikeas product approach, we might see the company begin to integrate new functions into more of its most popular items. [Photo: Ikea] How the donut became Ikeas most popular lamp Theres a pretty good chance that youve stumbled across Ikeas donut lamp on your feeds. Since 2023, the lamp has gone viral multiple times among design enthusiasts. It’s become so ubiquitous that Marcelis says shes often walked past houses and seen it glowing through the windows. It was pretty wild how viral it went, she says. When designing Varmblixt, I wanted to create timeless pieces that could be interpreted in many ways. The fact that the lamp can be both wall mounted and used as a table lamp already makes it very versatile. It’s a lamp that even if you have nothing else in a room, it works. On TikTok and Instagram Reels, the donut lamp has generated an entire subgenre of videos dedicated to donut lamp hacks that use colorful electrical tape pasted over the interior bulb to darken the hue of the lamp. But with the smart donut lamp, Ikea fans will no longer need to risk overheating tape to curate their own lighting vibe. [Photo: Ikea] The donut lamp gets a colorful facelift To make the smart donut lamp compatible with a range of colors, Marcelis traded the originals glossy orange surface for a matte white exterior that lets the interior bulbs colors shine through. Its soft in texture and void of color, making the internal light source and colors it creates inside the volume glow in a really soft, diffused manner on the shell, Marcelis says. Users can choose to connect the lamp to the Dirigera hub, which allows them to access a full color spectrum of more than 40 hues, adjust light intensity, and fiddle with dimming settings. The lamps default setting, however, is controlled by a remote featuring 12 colors selected by Marcelis specifically for the collection. The sequence moves through different temperatures of white light, into glowing amber and red, followed by soft pink, cool lavender, turquoise, yellow, and back to white. I wanted the presets that you can vary between with the remote to be 12 specific atmospheres that range from alert work-mode light to party mode and all the way to cozy, calm mode, Marcelis says. I’ve had an early prototype in our guest room for the last six months, and this one pretty small lamp can change the hue of the whole room.
Category:
E-Commerce
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