After the website

Today's New York Times has a must-read article for our Macy's management: how affluent "location-neutral professionals" are bringing their cultural expectations and higher incomes into communities like the primarily rural one in which I live and our Macy's is trying to survive. It's called "Off to Resorts, and Carrying Their Careers."



Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/us/13steamboat.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin



Here's a snippet:



In places like Nantucket, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Teton County, Idaho, the migrants are creating hybrid communities, implanting urban incomes, tastes, careers, ambitions, restaurants, cultural activities and networking opportunities into small towns that until recently could support none of these, and for which there has been little planning and still no consensus.
“You are seeing a transformation of rural communities,” said Jonathan Schechter, executive director of the Charture Institute in Jackson, Wyo., a nonprofit organization that studies small recreational towns. ..
Into quiet resort spots the migrants have come, laptops on their knees: fund managers from New York, software developers from California, consultants, proofreaders, engineers, inventors. “The same processes that led to the suburbanization of the United States after World War II,” Mr. Schechter said, “are now producing a virtual suburbanization in places like Jackson or Steamboat Springs.”


Why is this important for our Macy's? Because these are the folks who journey in to us from quiet little outposts to seek the quality of purchasing opportunity that they associate with the Macy's name in Herald Square or Kenwood Town Center or other really big up-market places. They come in before or after their leisurely dinners in restaurants that we low-paid locals enter only on special occasions. They drive up in cars we cannot afford and they don't worry about the cost of parking.



These customers don't want us to tell them to "look on the website." That is how they spend their lives at home, and now they've come to handle the stuff that looks good in the pictures. How solid is that glaze on the china? How long is the staple on that towel? What does the difference between 500 and 600 count sheeting really feel like, and would 800 really be worth allt hat extra money?



Although the Women's Departments have been good about serving more of these customers, I am a little worried that our Men's Furnishings have pretty much nothing for "metrosexuals." We have only traditional business suits, no collarless high-count dress shirts. and no tuxedo shirts, no vests and suspenders. The answer is not to throw out what we've got -- which serves a vital need in our hardworking town -- but to double their floor space and commissioned staff, making sure there is always someone on hand -- and on the weekend, always more than one -- to be sure these pioneers of lifestyle find plenty of supplies to lay in for their foray into our new century.



These are folks for whom technology is a tool, not an alternative. We need to be able to meet the needs they find at the end of each websurfing path.