"They siphoned off the corporation's wealth to Wall Street stock sellers and top officers. That virtually guaranteed that Macy's would have to close stores and layoff thousands of workers, in effect, paying for all those stock incentives." Macy's stock price has dropped 75% from its peak in 2015, pushing it to close nearly a third of its locations in less than a decade, but Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute, argued Wednesday that the company could have responded to changes in the retail market by "reinvesting to modernize and become more competitive," but didn't—"a classic story." "Instead, they siphoned off the corporation's wealth to Wall Street stock sellers and top officers," Leopold told Common Dreams. "That virtually guaranteed that Macy's would have to close stores and layoff thousands of workers, in effect, paying for all those stock incentives."