Acquisition of The May Department Stores Company by Federated Department Stores

The acquisition of The May Department Stores Company by Federated Department Stores was announced on February 28, 2005, and was completed on August 30, 2005. May-owned regional department stores throughout the United States were converted to Federated-owned Macy's and Bloomingdale's stores by September 9, 2006. At the time, the US$11 billion transaction was the largest retail transaction in the United States, and Federated became the third-largest general merchandise retailer in the country.

The acquisition introduced or expanded Macy's to new markets across the United States; Federated renamed itself Macy's, Inc. in 2007. It changed the composition of shopping malls nationwide, many of which had Federated and May brands for anchor stores and were left with multiple Macy's stores or vacancies. The transaction was criticized for replacing local heritage with a national brand, and received varying degrees of local opposition in affected markets. Several of the converted stores were permanently closed, and the scale of Macy's, Inc. was drastically reduced, as a result of the retail apocalypse in the 2010s.