Field's of Dreams

More than 250 people made noise outside a Chicago department store a few Saturdays ago because its owners aren't willing to supply their demand.

This started a year ago, when Federated Department Stores replaced all its brand names with Macy's. This seemed to sting the most in Chicago, where the obliterated name was Marshall Field's. The protesters wanted this reversed.

In a sense, this was a market failure: Customers who wanted Field's got Macy's instead. It shows that you can't always get what you want, even when you've got money in hand.

Jim McKay, who started a Web site called fieldsfanschicago.org, has been passing out leaflets decrying Macy's flaws. He says his main vexation isn't just the name, it's that the store itself changed.

"Marshall Field's was, on one level, something people aspired to," he says. Now, he contends, it's sloppily stocked and the merchandise isn't as nice.

"Macy's is not the same store as Marshall Field's," Jim McComb, a Minneapolis retail consultant, says. It's certainly been a bigger change in the Twin Cities than when, a few years ago, Minnesota's vaunted Dayton's department stores were renamed Marshall Field's. That, says Mr. McComb, was an even trade.

Macy's, he says, is a step down. It's what happens when establishing a national brand means aiming a little lower. About 12% of Field's merchandise was house brands; it's about 20% for Macy's. That displaces other, more upscale brands customers were buying, he says. Macy's, too, has dropped some departments. People notice.

But what's the problem? There's no lack of other, ritzier department stores, particularly in Minneapolis and Chicago.

The problem for Mr. McKay is that Nordstrom or Lord & Taylor might be nice, but he doesn't want either. He wants Field's. He had it, now he doesn't.

There is civic pride involved: Chicago's Second City irritation that its world-famous brand was replaced by one from, of all places, New York. Online forums and sidewalk protests are filled with talk of a lost Chicago identity, as if poppy-seed hot-dog buns had been banned.

Mr. McKay admits there are more pressing problems in the world. Yet it seems so small a concession for the owners to keep a name, use green shopping bags instead of red stars, expend a bit more effort.

He gets sympathy from me, though limited: I'm still a little miffed about Gimbel's. The original store that later branched out to New York had stood for decades as Milwaukee's big downtown emporium. Corporate chicanery rebranded it as Marshall Field's in the 1980s. Soon, the deli was gone, the upper floors were sealed off, the restaurant where I'd had breakfast with Santa was obliterated. By the 1990s, the whole thing had dwindled to a couple of floors that might as well have been run by the North Korean Ministry of Abundance.

But it wasn't malice that prompted that move. For whatever reason, the company owning the store didn't think the Gimbel's name was a moneymaker in Milwaukee, nor, apparently, was the top-floor restaurant.

Perhaps the situation's different in Chicago, where downtown retail has always been more of an event. Mr. McKay says he and others are ex-customers — he hasn't bought anything at the former Field's since the switch — and news reports suggest the change nationwide hasn't been a rousing success.

Yet all this suggests that because retail is for customers more than economics — encompassing sentiment and memory and unduplicatable quirks like the old wooden escalator at Gimbel's — economics can't guarantee the market will give you just what you want.

You need willing sellers. It may be that, much as Mr. McKay and thousands of others want it, Macy's doesn't find it worthwhile to sell just what Field's once did. If it did, it still may not find it worthwhile to do it under the Field's name.

If your demand is for a nice V-neck sweater at $59.50, the market will supply. If you want it from a particular store, someplace has to be willing to go on being that particular store. Which doesn't always happen, and that's a little sad.

There's comfort, however: Just as markets fail to deliver some particular demands, they offer unexpected supply. Until a few years back, I had no idea I wanted inexpensive yet well designed Swedish modern furniture that I'd assemble with an Allen wrench. Then Ikea showed up in suburban Chicago. My house is now rife with chairs and cabinets bearing Nordic names.

This isn't inconsiderable. I used to be okay with gas stations that sold gas. Now I realize I really, without knowing it, wanted the gas followed by one of six varieties of coffee, airpot-fresh instead of cooked on a hotplate, with real half-and-half, not that powered stuff, and fresh doughnuts in a bakery case.

What was a necessity has become a pleasure because some convenience store chains got bright ideas about inducing a little extra demand. Not to compare Kwik Trip with Marshall Field's, but we do not face uniform and inevitable decline.

My best wishes to Mr. McKay, fieldmarshaling the Chicago retail resistance. May his demands spur supply. Yet even if he doesn't make Macy's cave, even if you can't always get what you want, it's good to know that, once in a while, you just might find you get what you need — even if you didn't know you needed it.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.