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Macy’s CEO Jeffrey Gennette to retire next year

Yahoo Finance Live anchors Julie Hyman and Brad Smith discuss the decline in stock for Macy’s following news that CEO Jeffrey Gennette will retire next year.

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: You think about this other role in Macy's CEO that I just want to circle back to as well very briefly here because at the end of the day, I think for Macy's and how they've tried to chart their own turnaround story, this is a brand that's had to invest so much and I would say was kind of late to the game within their e-commerce strategy, or it was just far too cluttered. There were so many SKUs on the website that easily a customer could get inundated.

And so now looking at how they've been able to move forward the digital strategy, have that meld better with this broader omnichannel approach, and then even in the items that they've got in store, making that more kind of fashion conscious even as you've seen the growth of some of these homegrown brands, especially within the department store like Macy's, like-- you can go down the line-- Macy's, all of their subsidiaries, Nordstrom, and so forth.

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But within all of that, I think they've been able to show now that there is more of an uptick or at least a take on of some of that inventory from the higher-value consumer that's out there too saying, OK. Yeah, you've got a Scotch & Soda out there. Great. You've got, you know, some of the higher-end brands that I'm looking for. But they have lost some partnerships as more direct-to-consumer strategies have emerged like that of a Nike as well.

JULIE HYMAN: Right, and Macy's is still predicting its comps are going to fall 2% to 4% this year. So it still-- it doesn't seem as though there is a forced-out situation here for Jeff Gennette, as far as I can tell. But it is a time when, yes, he has led Macy's through some tough times, but it's still not doing--

BRAD SMITH: It's not out of the woods yet.

JULIE HYMAN: --fantastically well. So this is the challenge that Tony Spring is now confronted with.

Incidentally, as I was looking at this announcement here noting that at all of the big department-store chains, it's all dudes, which is kind of interesting, and it's not diverse dudes. So it's interesting. Although I should say Jeff Gennette is an out gay CEO, which is relatively rare still in corporate America and even in retail in particular. But it's just interesting that we're still-- we're not seeing that diversity at the top of-- especially since you typically hear retail CEOs talking about her--

BRAD SMITH: Right.

JULIE HYMAN: --as the customer. They talk about this apocryphal her as the one that they are gearing towards. Anyway, it's just--

BRAD SMITH: No, it's a great point.

JULIE HYMAN: --a side note that I noticed as we were talking about this.

BRAD SMITH: I mean, yes. And if the core consumer is, of course, a diverse basket of customers, at the end of the day, the executive team should probably reflect that as well.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. I mean, the board, I guess, is more diverse at Macy's, but anyway.