Whether you’re a dedicated shopaholic or not, department stores are world renowned because of their goods, sense of luxury and their architectural appeal, becoming tourist attractions in their own right. But the question is, which ones have stood the test of time as the world’s most popular department stores?
Property experts Stokemont.com wanted to answer this question by collating a core list of 47 of the world’s most famous stores and recording the number of Instagram hashtags, TikTok views and average global search trend data, assigning an overall popularity score, in order to rank the most popular stores.
Some of the key findings include:
Macy’s in New York just beats Seattle’s Nordstrom in the battle for top spot.
The UK and US dominate the top five most popular global department stores.
European department stores make up 5 of the top 10 most popular global department stores, including Selfridges, Harrods and Galeries Lafayette .
Results from the research:
| Ranking | Department store | Location | Average Global Search Volumes | Instagram Hashtags | TikTok Views | Score |
| 1 | Macy’s | New York, USA | 14,200,000 | 1,231,000 | 118,300,000 | 9.65 |
| 2 | Nordstrom | Seattle, USA | 6,700,000 | 1,635,000 | 110,000,000 | 9.58 |
| 3 | Selfridges | London, England | 1,100,000 | 671,000 | 74,400,000 | 8.96 |
| 4 | Harrods | London, England | 708,000 | 1,554,000 | 61,000,000 | 8.89 |
| 5 | Bloomingdale’s | New York, USA | 1,700,000 | 342,000 | 53,100,000 | 8.68 |
| 6 | Saks Fifth Avenue | New York, USA | 1,300,000 | 403,000 | 16,700,000 | 8.61 |
| 7 | Galeries Lafayette (Haussmann) | Paris, France | 1,100,000 | 385,000 | 17,800,000 | 8.47 |
| 8 | David Jones | Melbourne, Australia | 1,400,000 | 395,000 | 5,100,000 | 8.33 |
| 9 | El Corte Inglés | Barcelona and Madrid, Spain and Lisbon, Portugal | 9,900,000 | 211,000 | 16,900,000 | 8.26 |
| 10 | Beymen | Istanbul, Turkey | 387,000 | 316,000 | 7,800,000 | 7.64 |
Macy’s, New York unsurprisingly tops the list as the most popular global department store with a final score of 9.65, with 118,300,000 TikTok views (1st in category) and 14,200,000 average monthly searches globally (1st in category) and 1,231,000 (3rd in category) for Instagram hashtags.
Macy’s was closely followed by Nordstrom in Seattle (9.58), and Selfridges, London with a final popularity rank of 8.96.
Overall, in the top 10, 4 were in the US and 2 were in the UK. When reviewing the entire data set, the US and the UK had 6 department stores respectively, followed by Germany and Italy with 5.
Highest ranking department stores per category:
Average monthly global searches:
Macy’s: 14,200,000
El Corte Inglés: 9,900,000
Nordstrom: 6,700,000
Instagram hashtags:
Nordstrom: 1,635,000
Harrods: 1,554,000
Macy’s: 1,231,000
TikTok views:
Macy’s: 118,300,000
Nordstrom: 110,000,000
Selfridges: 74,400,000
