New England’s sole full-fledged Saks Fifth Avenue store is more than 200 miles away from the flagship New York location where the luxury retailer forged its reputation, and nearly 2,000 miles from the Texas bankruptcy court where it is trying to chart its future. But on Wednesday, the Prudential Center outpost of the upscale department store appeared to be a sign of the times.
The number of mannequins rivaled the number of customers in the store, punctuated by “sale” signs, spread across two floors in the Back Bay tower. Under bright lights, employees posted up near a sunglasses display and in a Dior nook scrolled on their phones. A blonde shopper looked at an overcoat, glanced at the $1,298 price tag, and kept moving.
“Whenever I come here, not many people are around here,” said Leere Kang, a Back Bay resident who frequently stops by the store to browse, accompanied Wednesday by her two-year-old daughter. “It’s been very slow.”
That lethargy could be a problem as Saks Global, the parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman, enters Chapter 11 proceedings after buckling under the weight of the debt it took on to acquire Neiman Marcus for $2.7 billion in 2024.
As the legacy department stores that once dotted the Boston area — Barneys, Lord & Taylor — continue to die off, Saks and its sister brands have hung on. Just a few blocks from the Saks store in the Pru, a Neiman Marcus outpost anchors the Copley Place mall. These two stores remain reliable destinations for high-end shoppers to pick up an animal-print Louboutin purse ($1,690), a Mackage faux-fur coat ($990), or a pair of bow-topped Miu Miu heels ($1,150).
But even with Saks Global now buoyed by $1.75 billion in financing announced alongside its bankruptcy filing, it’s unclear whether the locations in one of Boston’s toniest enclaves will continue to operate, or whether the high-end retail concept has simply fallen too far out of fashion.
Saks opened its Boston store in 1971, when the Prudential Center was less than a decade old. According to Globe coverage from the time, roughly several hundred people, “mostly young elegantes wearing the latest fashions,” were present at the ribbon-cutting of the 115,000-square-foot store — the largest Saks had ever built from the ground up.
At the time, it was considered a coup for the city — a place where the brand’s 20,000 Boston-area charge account holders could get their American and European fineries a little closer to home.
“There are people in Boston who won’t shop anywhere else,” said Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president and executive director of the Back Bay Association. “The salespeople have long-term relationships with their clients. They text them about things. They’ve got personal shoppers. It’s a whole experience.”
But these days, the realities of brick-and-mortar retail are cut from a very different cloth. Placer.ai, an analytics firm that tracks foot traffic, found that annual visits to the Saks Fifth Avenue chain declined 5.7 percent year over year in 2025, while visits to Neiman Marcus dropped 4.6 percent.
This slowdown occurred even as overall visits to luxury department stores and luxury apparel and accessory stores ticked up slightly, Placer.ai found.
In an email to the Globe, Saks Global said that its stores are “open to serve customers” amid the Chapter 11 proceedings. The company did, however, acknowledge that bankruptcy will involve a “footprint evaluation,” and that they “have already begun to work collaboratively with our real estate partners to find future-facing solutions.”
Representatives for BXP, which owns the Pru, and Simon Property Group, which operates Copley Place, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (In addition to the Saks Fifth Avenue store in the Pru, there is also a dedicated Saks store for men in Copley Place, and locations of the cut-rate retailer Saks Off 5th in Somerville and Wrentham.)
Mainzer-Cohen said her heart sank when she saw the bankruptcy news. She described Saks and Neiman Marcus as “two big anchors to the retail environment” in the Back Bay neighborhood.
“I’m hoping that there is a path forward,” she said. “Sometimes the reorganizing can actually save what people love about the different brands.”
Saks, for its part, insists that its decline in sales stems from supply, not demand, as affluent Americans increasingly fuel spending. Amid Saks Global’s financial challenges — or “liquidity constraints,” as it was described in a bankruptcy filing — suppliers began reporting missed payments, and the pipeline of merchandise going to the stores got snarled. Fewer new wares in stock meant fewer sales, a vicious cycle that the cash infusion has the potential to fix.
Felicia Ishola and Dan Collins, a Framingham couple, went to Saks on Wednesday to look for a bathing suit for Ishola, but there were none to be found.
“Every time I shop Saks, it’s usually online,” she said. “So I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t find what I was looking for.”
Though not a frequent customer, Ishola said she would miss being able to browse if the store were to shutter — though perhaps it would have a silver lining.
“Felicia did say, ‘Well, maybe they’ll have a fire sale and we’ll get everything cheap later on,’” Collins said.
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