Don’t mess with Marshall Field’s

FOR THE DOLTS WHO work in the department store industry’s Idiotic Notions Department, specifically those responsible for last week’s shop-biz bombshell that, in 2006, the venerable Marshall Field’s chain will go by the name Macy’s, I have just two words: What next?

I can see it coming (and so can you): A news conference in South Dakota to reveal that, thanks to a generous corporate donation, Mt. Rushmore’s national monument henceforth will be known as Mt. Google. A perplexing decision by a Tribune-owned baseball team to rechristen itself as the Los Angeles Cubs of Chicago.

If you grew up in New York City, as some of you did, you knew Macy’s to be a swell place to give Santa a lap dance. If you grew up on the opposite coast, as you Southern Californians did by the trillions, well, I doubt if you associate Christmas with shopping at Macy’s any more than you associate Thanksgiving Day with takeout from In-N-Out.

And then there are those of us, such as myself, who were born and raised in “Chicagoland,” a name that sounds a little like a Michael Eisner brainstorm for a theme park.

Macy’s means nothing to us. Marshall Field’s has always been it, the North Pole of the Midwest, whether we have gone there at Christmas to window-shop or to bug Santa for a BB gun or to max out a credit card on a Hermes scarf that would have been the envy of even Oprah.

Don’t get me wrong: Macy’s is no hole in the wall. I don’t mind if you shop there till you drop. If a commander from the mother ship of the Federated Department Stores feels the need to launch a Macy’s in every mall from Kankakee to Rancho Cucamonga, so be it.

Why, oh, why, though, must the hallowed name of Marshall Field’s be Botoxed out of our shopping lives in some kind of cosmetic moniker makeover?

All of us grow accustomed to change. If somebody says Ceylon should be called Sri Lanka, we say, thank ya. If somebody tells us first that the artist Prince is now The Artist Formerly Known as Prince and later that he is a symbol that looks like a cross between a petroglyph and a fleur-de-lis, OK, cool. I happily adapt if Orange County’s airport adopts the name of a movie cowpoke. I don’t need to be the smartest person in the room to understand whyHouston chooses to convert to Minute Maid Park from Enron Field. But come on, man ... Marshall Field’s transforming into Macy’s? It might as well go into a department-store witness protection program.

I can’t speak for my Chicago neighbors, but come the name change, with just a few shopping days remaining till Christmas 2006, if I should deign pay a visit to the stately State Street store in the Loop or the more modern one in Water Tower Place, I plan to instruct my taxi driver: “Take me to The Store Formerly Known as Marshall Field’s.”