Macy's (currently stylized as "macy★s") is the largest and one of the only remaining nationwide department store chains in the United States. Macy's advertises that its flagship store on Herald Square in midtown Manhattan, New York City is the largest department store in the world, but this is no longer true.1 Macy's is also known as the headline sponsor of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.
The original Macy's story was founded by Rowland Hussey Macy as a dry goods store in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1851. In 1858, the store moved to New York City. From the earliest days, the Macy's logo always included a star of some sort, derived from a tattoo Macy got as a teenager while he worked as a whaler on a ship out of Nantucket.
In the 1920s, Macy's embarked on a series of acquisitions of local, regional, and finally national department store chains that would forge it into its current form as a department store empire. Major purchases of other department stores included Lasalle & Koch (1924), Davison's (1929), Bamberger's (1929), O'Connor Moffat & Company (1945), John Taylor's (1947), Bullock's (1986), I. Magnin (1986), and Broadway (1995. A merger with Federated Department Stores in 1994 brought in numerous other department store chains. Finally in 2005, Macy's bought out the nationwide May Company group of department store chains which also included Robinson's, Marshall Field's, Filene's, Strawbridge's, Kaufmann's, Hecht's, Famous-Barr, Foley's, The Jones Store, L.S. Ayres, and Meier & Frank. Nearly all of these stores have since been renamed and rebranded as "Macy's."
1. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the current largest department store in the world is the Shinsegae store in Busan, South Korea; its area of 5,487,595 square feet is over twice that of the Macy's flagship branch.