May operated it as a separate division for nearly forty years, expanding the chain to Utah in 2001, as a result of a conversion of May Company's Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) stores purchased in 1999.

In 2002, May consolidated its operation with North Hollywood, California-based Robinsons-May, but retained the historic Meier & Frank name in the Oregon, Utah, and Washington markets.

Federated decided to rename the store chains that it had acquired through its takeover of May – including Meier & Frank – as Macy's, and the change took effect about a year later.

[4] (The following year, Federated also changed its own name to Macy's, Inc.) The company's flagship store was the historic Meier & Frank Building.

In 1857, Aaron Meier (1831–1889) arrived in the Oregon Territory at the age of 26 and opened a 35-by-50-foot (11 m × 15 m) mercantile store at 137 Front Street in Portland, which had a population of 1,300.

He formed a partnership with a Mr. Mariholtz and began selling merchandise that arrived by steamer from San Francisco and in the covered wagons rolling along the Oregon Trail.

Ten years later, Meier returned to Ellerstadt (in today's Rhineland-Palatinate) after his father died, leaving Mariholtz to run the business.

Meier & Frank emerged as "One of America’s Great Stores" as it moved uptown into its elegant five-story building, 200 by 100 feet (61 m × 30 m), on 5th Street (now 5th Avenue) between Alder and Morrison in 1898.

The company provided the furnishings for the Fairmount Hotel, constructed to serve out-of-town visitors to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.

Sales representatives there would joke that there were four major markets on the West Coast: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Meier & Frank.

A year earlier, Meier & Frank's radio station KFEC, with its antenna atop the 16-story building, began broadcasting from its studio on the fifth floor.

When President Roosevelt closed banks country-wide, Meier & Frank took out a full-page newspaper ad with a single word: "Confidence".

Meier & Frank devoted all of its newspaper advertising space to bond sales; for 1,207 continuous days the back page of the first section of The Oregonian ran ads—not to sell merchandise but to support the war effort.

[citation needed] After the war, the company completed the installation of the longest continuous up/down escalator system in the world, serving all selling floors of the store and costing $1.5 million.

Two years later, Meier & Frank demolished the Portland Hotel and built a two-level parking facility on a full block southwest of the store, between S.W.

In the late 1960s, Meier & Frank proposed an 11-story parking garage on the block, which the city denied after a series of heated public hearings.

[citation needed] In 2001, May rebranded its Utah-based Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) stores with the Meier & Frank name.

By the late 1990s, competing against the increasing number of dining options and against mall and food court marketing efforts did not make financial sense.