Posted on 03/01/2013 4:44:33 PM PST by PJ-Comix
JCPenney, the storied if unglamorous retailer, is in trouble. Big trouble. 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 to reorganize the stores, and imported Apple concepts, most notably a “no discounting” policy geared around convincing customers that the everyday price is a great price. The results seemed to speak for themselves, but I was curious. After all, I’ve never given the “new” JCPenney a try. Perhaps Johnson is a visionary genius who’s reinvented the department store, and the world just isn’t ready for him. Perhaps he’s the victim of bad luck. Perhaps shareholders just need to hold on and have faith.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Penny’s certainly has a lot of problems, but it is not limited to them. Almost all of retail is tanking this quarter.
My grandfather was a JCP manager back in the 20’s and 30’s when there was a Penney’s in just about any middle-sized town of any consequence. He was moved around a lot, having a reputation in the company of bringing poorly performing stores back to life.
He started a new store here in the town where a lot of our family still lives, although he’s been dead for 49 years now. The company wanted to move him again about 1940 but he liked it here and the co. wouldn’t back down so he quit and became a carpenter. I doubt even he could straighten out the mess Penney’s has become.
Seems everything there is from China, and forget paying 50 and above for a blouse!
It’s hardly ‘pennies’ Penney’s.
I wouldn’t go back for free stuff, let them go bankrupt
So where do you shop at?
We do not go there anymore either, and for exactly that reason. I’ve sent them a few notes (like “drop me from your email solicitations”), but they never take note. Let them close. Put up a Chick-fil-A on the site.
Yeah, he’ll make up the money he loses selling you a shoe for $18 by volume.
Otherwise, I don't shop at Penneys anymore. The merchandise stinks, no sales/coupons and you have to run all over the store to find a cashier. Oh, and like Sears, Penneys has gone bilingual. Sorry, but that bilingual nonsense bugs me. This country's official language is English. If the immigrants want to live here, they should learn the language.
I’m with you. I will NOT give my money to a store that advertised Father’s Day with a picture of two married homosexuals.
johnson’s most likely driven penneys into bankruptcy. the whole homo thing backfired and the store-within-a-store thing has not worked because way to few penneys stores have been remodeled to actually be able to offer store-within-a-store experience like their ads lead customers to expect when they walk into a penneys.
I think JCP’s recent homosexually-oriented catalog was a mistake. It is fine to market to subgroups but the main catalog should not attempt to do it, it can alienate, or at least confuse, other customers.
Having said that, we have always liked JCP for the quality of its household fabrics (towels, drapes, etc.) and clothing.
Anyone still wishing to give JCP a try after that catalog fiasco, may wish to search through its website Clearance items, some of the sale prices are quite good (on some good quality merchandise). (Allow extra time, however, because items are shown on sale and you put them into your “cart” and when you get to “checkout” the computer finally wakes up and tells you they ain’t got anymore. It can take an hour to buy just one item successfully as you have to cycle through several variations ... each all the way to the checkout page, to find one that they still really have available. And it is very frustrating if they are out of every possible variation you could accept, too. JCP needs to fix this!)
We shopped JCP our entire lives, as did our parents, and always have been very happy with the store’s good quality merchandise (in these key departments anyway). I hope they pull through... (and never send us another “gay” catalog!)
Yeah, I haven’t been back since Ellen DeGenerate has started shilling for JCP.
Last time I visited that store it had the look and feel of what I imagined a socialist department store would be like.
I worked in the JCP shoe department while I was in college. Pay wasn’t much, but the benefits were pretty good. ;^)
I was a suit specialist at JC Penney for three years until last year when they decided they didn’t need a full time specialist in the department.
The sales in that department have fallen off dramatically in the store where I work and most likely all others, but in these BAD times, the corporate heads would rather lose the business that have to pay someone to be there full time.
The company is so poorly run now it’s pathetic. I don’t know if it will ever recover from the damage that’s been done.
Nothing dumbass Johnson can do will bring me back into those stores. They’re dead to me.
I was in a J.C. Penny last fall. ( I did not buy anything.) I noticed that the female manikins had the hip structure usually seen in black women.
So?...With only 6.5% of the U.S. population being black women, why display their clothing on models that represent such a small minority? This is especially true when the clothing is designed for the hip structure of the majority and looks wrinkled and pulled on the J.C. Penny manikins.
Dumb marketing, in my opinion.
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