Arguing that "the line between stores and the Internet is blurring so much," Macy's (NYSE:M) has become the first major publicly held retailer to stop reporting its E-Commerce stats. Setting aside the fact that Macy's would always see less disclosure—especially to rivals—as a nice thing, the move signals an important step for omni-channel/merged-channel retailing. The day when in-store, mobile and online are so intermixed that they can't be meaningfully broken out is the same day true merged-channel retailing has happened. For Macy's, that day happened on Tuesday (Feb. 26).
"Candidly, it's getting so hard to know what's a store sale and what's a mobile sale and what's Internet. It's getting harder to figure out the lines between them," Macy's CFO Karen Hoguet told analysts on Tuesday. When asked for some E-Commerce projections, she said: "I really can't give you that number. I mean, I don't know it. But clearly, the growth is continuing very aggressively. But sometimes, it's being bought on a mobile device sitting in a store. So I'm not sure how to define that."