Saks shuts down its store in Manhattan retail wars

Bloomberg

For department stores, the fight for New York is fiercer than ever.
In a sign of retrenchment ahead of rivals’ expansion, luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue is shutting the doors of its women’s store at Manhattan’s Brookfield Place this week — a location it opened just two years ago. While Saks’s smaller men’s store will stay open, the failure of the women’s shop shows that New York remains a department-store battlefield — and highlights how the competition is intensifying.
Both Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus will be opening Manhattan locations this year, infringing on the turf that’s long been associated with Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Bergdorf Goodman. “For New York specifically, there is a real battle for consumer spending as more large stores open in the city,” said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail. The Saks Brookfield Place store, he said, may not have even been needed given the company’s flagship location about 5 miles north on Fifth Avenue.
“The whole purpose of a flagship is that it draws in people from a very large radius without the need for smaller locations,” Saunders said.
Saks, which is owned by Toronto-based Hudson’s Bay Co, said that the women’s store was a test concept and allowed the company to learn that women’s “preferred format is a combination of our digital channels and our iconic Fifth Avenue flagship.”
Brookfield, meanwhile, will soon announce a new “amenity-focussed tenant to take the majority of space Saks will vacate,” according to a spokesman for the mall.
Saks is slimming down as competitors beef up their presence in Manhattan. Much-anticipated retail space at Hudson Yards, in the Chelsea neighbourhood, will open in March.