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Talk:Lazarus
The Lazarus/Ayres/Macy Connection
To get all pedantic and stupid about it, there was a whole series of mergers leading to Lazarus, Macy's, and L.S. Ayres being the same company:
- L.S. Ayres was acquired by Associated Dry Goods in 1972, which was acquired by May in 1986.
- Federated was created as a holding company for Lazarus in 1929.
- Federated acquired Macy's in 1994.
- In 2003, Federated started double-barreling their store names, adding -Macy's to them. Not sure if this happened in Bloomington, but a lot of Lazarus stores became Lazarus-Macy's.
- In 2004, most of the double-barrel names were changed to just Macy's.
- In 2005, Federated acquired May.
- In 2006, Federated started renaming most of their acquired May properties (like L.S. Ayres) to Macy's.
- In 2007, Federated changed the name of the holding company itself to Macy's.
I don't know if this happened in Bloomington, but in a lot of other malls, there were strange edge cases where there were two anchor stores that were both Federated/Macy's. Sometimes one was sold off or demolished. There are several malls here in northern California that had both a Macy's and a Emporium or Capwell's, which were both acquired by Macy's, and they turned one store into Macy's mens, the other into Macy's women's. There's also a mall in Richmond, CA in which Wal-Mart took over a former Federated anchor, which is the most bizarre Wal-Mart you'll ever see.
