00:00Macy's posted strong sales and raised its outlook this morning.
00:04The CEO, Tony Spring, telling Bloomberg's Romain Bostic, who is sitting to my left,
00:09quote, the customer remains resilient.
00:11The customer at the middle and high end remains interested in newness and fashion.
00:16The customer at the low end is more choiceful.
00:18Great word.
00:19And for good reason, things are more expensive.
00:21Romain, choiceful.
00:24Yeah, Tony Spring uses that word a lot.
00:26I thought, though, the way he used it this quarter was a little bit different.
00:28And he talked about this idea, how that spending was actually continuing.
00:33And he saw that carrying over into the rest of this calendar year.
00:36That's a big reason why they raised their fiscal year guidance.
00:39But he also said, Matt, he was very clear about this.
00:42They're spending on the things that are new.
00:44They're spending on the things that are unique.
00:46The things that are like replenishing, like just going in to get a new white shirt or whatever like that,
00:51they're seeing a little bit more pressure there.
00:53So basically saying there's not a lot of pullback in spending, but there's not a lot of indulgence either.
00:57He said it's an interesting balance.
00:58And he's keeping a close eye on the situation with the economy and obviously with gas prices.
01:03Well, and I would guess with tariffs as well.
01:05Yeah.
01:06Especially when the justification now for tariffs centers around, you know, difficult labor conditions.
01:14Yeah.
01:14I asked him about this.
01:15This story broke overnight with the Trump administration kind of trying to reconstruct its tariff policy from the ground up.
01:20He said those assumptions are already sort of baked into their guidance right now.
01:25But the assumption right now is that they will be relatively stable.
01:28Basically not saying that tariffs will go up, tariffs go down, but they've accounted for that.
01:32And he also is very, I thought he was very sobering in the way he sort of talks about Washington.
01:36The idea that he seems to understand that it is, let's say, volatile.
01:40That's my word, not his.
01:41But they are sort of keeping an eye on that.
01:43But they think they can hold the line on price, meaning their own costs, but also the prices that they
01:48are passing on to the consumer.
01:49By the way, so Bloomingdale's is obviously their high-end.
01:5310% comp sales growth year over year.
01:55Okay.
01:55That's what I was going to ask.
01:56The Macy's store itself, that Macy's store brand is like 1.6%, which is an improvement over what it was
02:01in the past.
02:02But this is still, to a certain extent, a luxury story for Bloomingdale's.
02:06They've really leaned into that.
02:08They've also got, of course, a big boost by sort of, I guess, the withering, if you will, of the
02:12Sachs empire, which is Neiman Marcus Sachs and Bergdorf Goodman,
02:16although that could change when Sachs comes out of bankruptcy later this year.
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