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Rediscovering Macy’s in Our Mindless Pick-and-Click Culture
Who hasn’t been seduced by slick product images on retail websites, and then lured into clicking on various clothing items that didn’t live up to their JPEGs? As I can attest, it’s all too easy to imagine that shirts and pants would fit as they do on the AI-generated models. Only to have dreams dashed and return merchandize authorizations printed. I’ve been through this one too many times.
So with the worst of CV over, I decided to return to the legacy world of department stores. In my case, Macy’s giant flagship store in mid-town NYC — “covers a city block!”
Boy howdy, these non-virtual stores are wonderful. It’s great to actually touch fabric, and experience retinal image quality that’s true to the actual color. They even have these special areas — they’re called “fitting rooms” — where you can try on a pair of pants and walk around to see how they feel.
During my most recent shopping expedition to Macy’s, I begin to realize what these new department stores must have felt like to its earliest customers — a wondrous place that had astonishing variety, and at good prices. And I also began to appreciate my late mom’s (and other women of a prior generation) worship of such high-end Manhattan shopping emporiums as B. Altman’s and Bonwit Teller.
