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Macy’s department store is starting an all-black dress code on the East Coast in order to make it easier for customers to locate customer service reps. Whether or not this new dress-code will roll out to the West Coast is yet to be determined. However, I don’t think the issue with Macy’s is that their customers have a hard time finding customer service reps to help them, it’s having more reps available to service their customers.

I worked for Macy’s for about a month and noticed that there simply wasn’t enough customer service reps on the floor at any given time. Sometimes there would only be two reps covering four or five different departments and if they’re both behind the counter or in the dressing room, there’s nobody on the sales floor. In contrast, if you walk into Nordstrom (where I worked for almost four years) you will see at least 3-4 customer service reps per department. There isn’t one department that doesn’t have someone available to help a customer.

My solution for Macy’s is to use that $400+ million that Federated Department Str (FD) (the company that owns Macy's) is saving from advertising cutbacks and hire more employees to be on the floor to service their customers. A customer should never have to go on a hunt to find someone available to help them. If you’re supposedly a fashion forward company, you should let your employees dress fashionable. Not that all-black isn’t fashionable, but it’s quite boring. For someone like me that would mean buying a whole new wardrobe - is Federated going to pay for that?