Macy’s Touted a Metric That Ended Up Being Juiced for Years

For years, Macy’s Inc. touted its ability to boost profits by cutting delivery costs and trimming other expenses on calls with Wall Street analysts. Then on Monday, the department store chain surprised investors by revealing that those very costs had become the source of an internal investigation into what the company has described as a multimillion-dollar employee plot to manipulate the metrics.

The retailer said the incident involved only one former employee, who had hidden as much as $154 million of delivery expenses since 2021. Cash was not taken from the company and the amount of hidden expenses is a ...