Dive Brief:

• Black Friday this year saw a significant shift to online shopping, but Macy’s chairman and CEO Terry Lundgren said that hardly means the death of brick and mortar.

• Still, Lundgren pointed out that Macy’s is prepared for all shoppers on all channels, including mobile, calling its online operations a strength for the company.

• Meanwhile, Fortune’s Phil Wahba predicts that Hudson’s Bay Co. could make a play next year to acquire Macy’s, noting the Canadian retail company’s penchant for buying department stores with significant real estate holdings.

Dive Insight:

Lundgren is the latest retail executive to defend the health of brick-and-mortar retail, and seemed to take particular pride in the traffic to Macy’s flagship Herald Square store in New York this year. The department store is an iconic holiday fixture and the sponsor of the namesake Thanksgiving Day parade.

But in order to survive, the retailer, like so many others, has had to respond to shifting consumer habits, including when, how, and what they buy. Still, not even this year’s apparent major shift to online Black Friday shopping is any major threat to Macy’s stores, according to its CEO.

"If you saw the traffic when we opened the doors at 6 pm, flowing into stores like Macy's Herald Square, you'd say people definitely want to shop on that night and in a store like Macy's," Lundgren told CNBC. "So we feel great about what's transpired here." 

Meanwhile, Fortune retail reporter Phil Wahba says that the American retailer could be a tempting morsel for Hudson’s Bay Co., which has made no bones about the importance of real estate holdings when it comes to its acquisition strategy.

“The advantage of our new structure going forward allows us to potentially go out and acquire other businesses that have a real estate component,” HBC governor Richard Baker said after the company’s annual meeting in June.

Macy’s has been under pressure to leverage its vast real estate holdings through a real estate investment trust or other means, but has so far resisted the idea. 

Macy’s could pay a price with a REIT. It’s true that it would extract dollars, and the value of the real estate vs. the retail operations would be made clear. But it could hurt the retailer’s flexibility and it’s ability to close or remodel underperforming stores. And it would force Macy's to spend money on lease payments that it might rather use to improve its retail business. 

That could be a distraction from Macy’s core business, something it’s still struggling to master in the new consumer-driven, omnichannel universe. But that would all be moot if Macy’s is gobbled up by real estate-hungry Hudson’s Bay.

“HBC has proven adept at spinning off real estate of prior acquisitions to rake in billions to make its next big deal,” writes Wahba. “And what more alluring trophy in the department store world is there than Macy’s?”