Hometown Pride

11 September 2006



Chicagoans Protest Demise of Marshall Fields

Chicago is still known as America’s second city, after New York, despite the fact that Los Angeles and Houston have passed it in population. It has its own local pride and culture, jazz and brats (don't call them hot dogs), and Mr. Jordan’s basketball team. So when New York-based Macy’s put its name on all the Chicago-based Marshall Fields stores, protests broke out in the Windy City. Management spent a year trying to find the balance between a nationwide brand and preserving Chicago’s contribution to American retail. They didn't win over everybody.

According to the Chicago Tribune, when the flagship Marshall Fields on State Street opened on Saturday as a Macy’s, 350 people were lined up to shop. Another 100 people stood on the corner of State and Washington with placards reading, “Don't Shop @ Macy’s” and “Marshall Field’s is a Chicago tradition.” They begged others not to enter the store. They even sang the city’s unofficial anthem, Frank Sinatra’s “My Kind of Town.”

Last September, Federated Department Stores, Inc., which seems to own every chain that isn’t part of Wal-Mart, decided to make all 61 Marshalls into a Macy’s. The idea was to create a nationwide brand at the top end of the scale. When they tried to open a Chicago Macy’s in 1998, they failed. The only way Chicagoans would pick Macy’s is if Marshall Fields was no more.

The fact that 100 people were up Saturday to protest the change in name of a department store rather than to protest the poor healthcare received by those on the South Side, or the War in Iraq, or the loss of middle-class jobs says much about modern America. At the same time, though, Marshall Fields was more than a store – it was part of the iconography of people from Chicago, along with the “L” and the Sox/Cubs divide. This change encapsulates what globalization is doing around the world.

The Trib wrote, “Ken San Pietro, 48, of Fox Lake visited Macy’s at Northbrook Court on Saturday and took all the hoopla in stride. ‘I’m here because I needed some cologne,’ San Pietro said. ‘I think the cologne will smell the same as if I bought it from Marshall Field’s’.” And it will, but now, there’s something less home-grown, less organic. The Big Mac in Paris tastes just like the one in Denver, and the cologne at Macy’s smells just like the cologne at Marshall Fields. So why leave home? It just doesn’t feel like progress.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.


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