Federated Department Stores - Delaware

Beautiful engraved specimen from the Federated Department Stores printed in 1974. This historic document was printed by Security-Columbian Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of two allegorical people next to a company seal. Ralph Lazarus shown as chairman. This item is over 32 years old.




Certificate Vignette

Federated Department Stores, Inc. is a department store chain founded in 1929 as a holding company in Columbus, Ohio, specializing mostly in retailing clothing, jewelry, dinnerware and watches. The company is currently headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and operates almost 1,000 stores in the United States, many under the Bloomingdale's and Macy's nameplates.

History

Federated Department Stores was founded in 1929 in Columbus, Ohio, as a department store holding company for Abraham & Straus, F&R; Lazarus & Company and William Filene's Sons. Bloomingdale Brothers joined the organization in 1930. In 1945 Federated moved its corporate offices to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Federated company headquarters building in Cincinnati.Over the next few decades, Federated expanded nationwide, adding Rike Kumler of Dayton, Ohio, Shillito's of Cincinnati (merged in the 1980s as Shillito-Rike's), Burdines of Miami, Florida, Rich's of Atlanta, Georgia, Foley's of Houston, Texas, Sanger Brothers of Dallas, Texas, A. Harris of Dallas, Texas (which was merged with Sanger Brothers to form Sanger-Harris), Boston Store of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Bullock's-I. Magnin organization.

Federated is the successor to the Lazarus operation begun in Columbus, Ohio, in 1851. Lazarus family members served in prominent positions within Federated through the 1980s. In the mid 1930s, a modern merchandising standard was set when Fred Lazarus (son of Simon) arranged garments in groups of a single size with a range of style, color and price in that size, rather than the other way around. Lazarus based this technique upon observations made in Paris. Fred Lazarus Jr. also convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt that changing the Thanksgiving holiday from the last Thursday of November to the fourth Thursday, extending the Christmas shopping season, would be good for the nation's business. A 1941 Act of Congress perpetuated the arrangement.

To support its huge retail operations, Federated has centralized its back-office functions into several large divisions, covering financial services, marketing, merchandising, logistics, and data processing systems. Other retailers' branded credit cards are usually issued and serviced by a third-party bank; Federated is so huge that it runs its own private bank, FDS Bank, which in turn issues and services the proprietary credit cards offered at Federated stores.

The exterior of a Macy's department store in downtown Cincinnati.In 1990, Federated went bankrupt after its hostile takeover by Robert Campeau's Allied Stores, and then taking over Macy's in 1994 while that company was still emerging from its own bankruptcy in 1992. Federated entered e-commerce late in 1998, and FDS Bank was one of the last credit card banks to allow its cardholders to access account information online (around 2004). The department store chain Stern's, a division of Federated, ceased operations in 2001, and most of its stores became Macy's stores. In 2003, Federated changed the nameplates of their non-Macy's stores, except Bloomingdale's, to include the Macy's name. For example, The Bon Marche, a Washington state-based store, became Bon-Macys; Goldsmith's, in Tennessee, became Goldsmith's-Macys; Lazarus, Burdines, and Rich's also added "-Macys" to their name. A year later, the original hyphenated names were dropped in favor of just Macy's.

May Department Stores Acquisition

On July 18, 2005, Federated Department Stores announced that they would acquire May Department Stores company for $11 billion in cash and stock. Also part of the buyout was the bridal and formal unit of May, consisting of David's Bridal and After Hours Formalwear. Federated would also assume $6 billion of May's debt, bringing total consideration to $17 billion. The deal would create the nation's largest department store chain with over 1,000 stores and $30 billion in annual sales. To help finance the deal, Federated agreed to sell its combined proprietary credit card business (but still administrated by FACS Group, a subsidiary of Federated) to Citigroup. The merger was completed on August 30, 2005, after an assurance agreement was reached with the State Attorneys General of New York, California, Massachusetts, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Federated has announced plans to sell 80 store locations in 2006, having pledged in its settlement to sell most of them as viable businesses, with preference being given to a group of thirteen competitors. This number could fluctuate pursuant to Federated's negotiations with various mall landlords and its final decision regarding using former May locations for its luxury Bloomingdale's operation. Madeline's has announced that it will sell the May Company division Lord & Taylor brand to a conglomerate of investors.

On September 9, 2006, May Company division stores Famous-Barr, Filene's, Foley's (the prior two are former Federated stores in their own right), Hecht's, The Jones Store, Kaufmann's, L.S. Ayres, Marshall Field's, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May, and Strawbridge's brands ceased to exist as Federated replaced most of them with the Macy's masthead, and some with the Bloomingdale's brand.

One of the consequences of this rebranding is that over 80 U.S. malls will have two Macy's department stores.

History from Wikipeida and OldCompanyResearch.com.

---

About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.