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However you’re counting the numbers, they hurt. JCPenney revealed in a regulatory filing yesterday that it finished its fiscal year ended Feb. 2 with 116,000 employees — a whopping 43,000 less than a year earlier. That’s a slashing of 27 percent — even steeper than the company’s disastrous revenue decline of 24.8 percent for the same period. It’s also more than twice the figure of 19,000 job cuts that Chief Executive Ron Johnson testified to under oath earlier this month, when asked during the company’s trial with Macy’s and Martha Stewart how many Penney employees had lost their jobs on...

Heads are rolling again at JCPenney. The flailing retailer — whose CEO, Ron Johnson, is now fighting for his own job — has fired 1,500 store-level department managers and merchandising positions across its chain, The Post has learned. The layoffs this week are the latest carnage at Penney, which last month eliminated 300 positions at its headquarters in Plano, Texas, according to sources. Last April, in the first of two major rounds of layoffs, Johnson canned 8,000 store-level positions, including managers and assistant managers, sources said. -snip- In January, the 1,100-store chain laid off 1,000 receptionists at its salons.

Former JC Penney CEO Allen Questrom told CNBC on Wednesday that the company's board of directors is wrong in thinking the struggling retailer can change its fortunes under current boss Ron Johnson. "The board has to take action. They can't be delusional like Ron Johnson is," Questrom said on "Fast Money Halftime Report." "This has been going on long enough. You can't say you're going to make your numbers for the year and then drop a billion dollars." Questrom, who has watched from afar as Penney's sales and stock have suffered, told CNBC that directors needed to act quickly. "If...

.... Fourth-quarter earnings results came out on Wednesday and they were terrible. The bad news starts with a quarterly loss of $427 million, but it doesn’t end there. Comparable store sales—meaning stores that were open this past quarter and also open in the same quarter of the previous year—fell by a mind-boggling 32 percent. Henry Blodget says it may have been the worst quarter posted by any retailer ever. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. JCPenney made a big splash in the retail world by hiring Ron Johnson, mastermind of Apple’s retail operations, as CEO. He immediately set about...

J.C. Penney is bringing back sales. The struggling department store chain this week will begin adding back some of the hundreds of sales it ditched last year in hopes of luring shoppers who were turned off when the discounts disappeared, CEO Ron Johnson told The Associated Press. Penney also plans to add price tags or signs for more than half of its merchandise to show customers how much they're saving by shopping at the chain — a strategy used by a few other retailers. For store-branded items such as Arizona, Penney will show comparison prices from competitors. The reversal comes...

"Penney’s sales at stores open at least a year plummeted more than 30 percent through most of the crucial holiday season, sources close to the company told The Post this week."

J.C. Penney Co Inc (JCP.N) slid as much as 8 percent on Friday after UBS published a research note saying holiday quarter sales have likely been worse than expected and questioned the retailer's ability to roll out its new shops on schedule. -snip- UBS analyst Michael Binetti lowered his forecast for Penney's fiscal fourth quarter, which is still underway and includes the holiday period, and expects same-store sales to decline 28 percent, from an earlier projection of a 20 percent decline.

J.C. Penny Co. was hit with a downgrade at Credit Suisse as the retailer’s sales continue to slow. Analyst Michael Exstein lowered his rating to underperform from neutral and cut his target price to US$15 from US$25 after the company reported its fifth straight quarterly loss on Friday. Mr. Exstein noted that J.C. Penny’s cash position continues to dwindle and it is expected to generate only a minimal amount of EBITDA in 2012 and 2013. The company has already sold US$525-million in non-core assets this year. “Time is no longer on J.C. Penny’s side, and going into the fourth quarter...

Libya's General National Congress (GNC) elected Ali Zeidan, a long-time opponent of deposed dictator Moamer Kadhafi, as prime minister on Sunday, the assembly's chief said. "Ali Zeidan is elected prime minister and is asked to propose a cabinet within two weeks," Mohammed Megaryef, president of the national assembly, said in remarks broadcast on television. Benefitting from the backing of the liberal coalition in the 200-seat assembly, Zeidan won 93 of the votes cast, trumping the 85 garnered by the only other candidate, local government minister Mohammed al-Hrari. The GNC must approve the government team proposed by Zeidan in order for...

J.C. Penney Co. is reporting a bigger-than-expected loss and plummeting sales, as its customers continue to be turned off by a new pricing plan that gets rid of hundreds of sales in favor of every day lower prices. It also withdrew its profit guidance for the year. The department store, based in Plano, Texas, says that it lost $147 million, or 67 cents per share, in the quarter ended July 28. That compares with a profit of 14 million, or 7 cents per share. snip

J.C. Penney (JCP) will say farewell to cash registers, checkout counters and cashiers by 2014, said Ron Johnson, the chain's CEO, during the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, reports Time. . . "Think of a physical store without a cash wrap," Johnson told the audience, according to Time. "About 10% of all the money we spend, half a billion dollars a year, goes to [checkout] transactions." The money saved by replacing checkout stations with new technology could be invested in improving customer service, he said.

Simply put, people are not shopping at J.C. Penney. AFA and OneMillionMoms are showing success in the effort to educate people to Penney's aggressive national campaign to promote "gay" marriage. The company is going downhill fast. Since February, the company stock has lost more than half its value, and Standard & Poor's Ratings Services lowered its credit rating on J.C. Penney Co. further into "junk" status.Snapshot of J.C. Penney under same-sex marriage crusade February 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 JCP announces Ellen DeGeneres as their new spokesperson. JCP launches catalog ad featuring two "gay" moms. JCP launches catalog...

J.C. Penney Co Inc (JCP.N) said on Monday that Michael Francis, a key member of the "dream team" the retailer assembled to carry out its transformation of everything from pricing to merchandising, was leaving the company, just months after he was lured from Target Corp (TGT.N). The move, announced in a brief statement, comes weeks after the department store operator said it had a worse-than-expected 18.9 percent drop in same-store sales for the first quarter as it tried to wean consumers off of coupons and frequent discounts as it adopted everyday prices. Francis, 49, was president and responsible for marketing...

J. C. Penney Company, Inc. today ousted its JCPenney brand president, Michael Francis, who oversaw the retailer's merchandising and marketing operations, with a terse statement that "We thank Michael for his hard work at jcpenney and wish him the best in his future endeavors." Francis, who was hired last October "at great expense" (as the New York Times retail reporter tweeted, in light of his whopping $12 million signing bonus) from Target is seen as taking the fall for his boss, company CEO Ron Johnson, the former Apple top retailer who oversaw JCP's new brand strategy in January. Now, of...

LifeSiteNews is reporting that J.C. Penney's is promoting sodomy. See here. The company is running Fathers Day ads featuring two "gay" dads. James Cash Penney's legacy is under assault. He most assuredly would not approve of his chain of department stores being used to advance the sodomite agenda. J.C. Penney's father was a Baptist preacher and farmer who raised his family with strict discipline in the Christian faith. Victor Parachin, writing for Mature Living magazine, notes how, "The influence of Penney's godly parents became evident with the growth of his business. He described his chain as 'The Golden Rule Store,'...

J.C. Penney (JCP) shares tumbled Wednesday after the retailer reported a much wider-than-expected first-quarter loss, suspended its dividend and saw weakness across all core metrics. In an apparent rebuke to new CEO Ron Johnson's strategy to change the company's focus from discounts to everyday low prices, total sales fell 20% while same-store sales declined 19% and gross margins fell to 37.6% from 40.5% as foot traffic in the stores dropped 10%. "Our marketing isn't doing the work," Johnson said in a conference call. "We've got to get our pricing across. Coupons were a drug, they really drove traffic. [Customers] need...

Call it J.C Penney’s private flash crash. The stock today plunged 19.7% to close at $26.57. That’s even worse than Black Monday 1987. On that day, the stock lost a hair less, 19.2%. It’s unclear if this is the stock’s worst day ever. (Perhaps it suffered an even worse day during the 1930s.) However, it is clear that this is the worst single-day performance in the past 40 years. That’s as far back as our FactSet data goes.*

By Abby Ellin May 3, 2012 Million Moms Rips JCPenney on Gay ‘Culture War’ When JCPenney last heard from One Million Moms, the “pro family advocacy” organization was threatening to boycott the national retail chain for refusing to fire openly gay spokeswoman Ellen DeGeneres. “By jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon, JC Penney is attempting to gain a new target market and in the process will lose customers with traditional values that have been faithful to them over all these years,” OMM, a division of the American Family Association wrote on its website. But JCP refused to budge, and the Moms,...