Macy’s Flagship Store

Macy’s iconic flagship store, already the world’s largest, just got even bigger. The department store chain recently completed a four year $400 million dollar renovation of its downtown Manhattan store. Nearly every floor and virtually every department, from shoes to luxury goods, has been affected. According to Terry J. Lundgren, Macy’s chairman, “It is our company’s most productive store, and experience shows that improvements in this location consistently result in higher customer traffic and sales volume.”

Matot was proud to partner with Mobility Elevator of West Caldwell, New Jersey on a customized solution to move retail items from the basement store room to the individual department levels. High volume items such as shoes and high value items such as handbags are often held remotely in the store room until required within a specific department. Matot provided two solutions to meet these needs.

Matot tote lifts can allow for the unattended sending and receiving of packages to various locations throughout a building. The inclusion of an automated tote table to the traditional dumbwaiter concept can greatly increase the efficiency of material flow and allow for a reduction in labor costs. For the Macy’s location, Matot expanded upon the single tote concept by incorporating a total of three automated staging tables in the storeroom for loading. One at a time these totes and their contents could be sent to individualized locations by simply processing their destinations on the wall mounted push button station. The interface is extremely intuitive and required very little staff training. On average, this tote lift cycles between 200-300 times per day without incident.

Additionally, a traditional Matot dumbwaiter was installed aside the tote lift for larger and heavier individual packages. This unit, shown with bi-parting stainless steel doors, is capable of lifting 250 pound loads and serves 4 floors within the store.

With the help of these two Matot solutions, Macy’s has kept pace with the increased customer traffic at this iconic location.