Their niche was "good quality at reasonable prices for middle-class shoppers". JCP cannot compete against WalMart on price.
-—Their niche was “good quality at reasonable prices for middle-class shoppers”. JCP cannot compete against WalMart on price.——
True, and even if they could, it takes years to develop that reputation.
OTOH, I do almost all of my dept. store shopping at Target. I don’t have time to fart around with coupons and sales flyers.
I wonder whether it was the homo thing or the dropping of sales that cost them, since I don’t know how much publicity the homo thing received. I guess it could be both.
Nice going though. I could have been the CEO, done nothing, and saved them quite,a bit of dough.
As an aside, I heard that Staples sales are flat. As a business customer, I’m bombarded with email sales, coupons, and reward programs.
Of course JCP can’t compete on price with WM, but its not trying to. On the same token, you won’t find the better brands and quality at WM that JCP has either.
THere is overlap obviously, but you can’t walk into a wal mart and find everything you find at JCP and vice versa.
JCP is a mall department store, WM is a cattle call box store.
We’ll see if this guys vision works, me personally I’d rather know if I go into JCP, I am getting a good price, not worry about having coupons or sales. Though I am not their primary customer either.
20% drop hurts, but major changes take time, is this sort term pain to adjust for better long term? Or is it just a massive screw up? Time will tell.