Thriving Department Stores: Is It Them or Aging Us?

Saks Fifth Avenue released results today that said sales were up 15.9 percent to $792.7 million verses $684.1 million last year. The same store sales were up 14. 4 percent. (Profits were way down, 86 percent, due to an extraordinary gain last year due to the sale of a middle-market department store). The gains this quarter are due to efforts of the management to refocus the brand mix towards the upper tier of luxury and layoffs.

I'm more interested than usual in the performance of department stores (Saks would prefer I say specialty stores, feeling department stores are more along the lines of Sears) following a lunch a few weeks ago with Averyl Oates, the fashion director of Harvey Nichols and Sagra Maceira de Rosen, a former luxury goods analyst at JP Morgan who is now heading up a private equity fund specializing in luxury. All of us talked about how we enjoy shopping in department stores more than we ever did before. Was it a sign they were improving? No, said Sagra. It was a sign we were getting old. As an analyst she found a direct relationship between customer age and happiness in department stores. It makes sense, given the relative ease of finding everything one wants under one roof, but still, for women bordering 40 felt vaguely insulting.

So I'm watching the numbers and tracking the performance, trying to figure out if the stores are really better or just simply better for me.