Well, well.
Amazing. Retail and politics don’t mix. My Mom used to take me to JCP every August to buy 2 pairs of corderoys for school. One blue, one brown.
Heh.
Intense competition in the retail sector....what does JC Penny offer that several other outlets not offer better.
I am sure that JC Penny’s progressive politics don’t help, but I think the real cause of its business woes is its poor management.
It’s called badwill.
JCP successfully managed to take a thriving company and by overt intentional recreation of their image, lose their marketshare.
Even if they turned around their operations, and in-store culture, they’ve thoroughly engrained in their customer base a hardened image of a company that refuses to provide sales of their desired commodities.
It ain’t coming back to JCP.
They will be smarter to file Chapter 11 and rename their enterprise.
I used to buy clothes from The Talbots until they stopped selling exclusively items made of natural materials - cotton, silk, wool, rayon. Why should I spend over $200 for a dress made of polyester? Designer names mean nothing to me!
J.C.Penney has an opportunity to change their P & L sheets fast, by going with natural fibers and conservative clothing for men and women. Conservative doesn’t mean frowdy, either. It means Classic!
I never shopped at Sears for clothes, simply because they looked cheap even if well made. Even when Sears carried Lands End, it was always the wrong colors they exhibited on mannequins, in my opinion.
Great if you're looking for a particular designer, but horrible if you're just looking for a nice shirt. Worst, more than half of their floorspace is now effectively subletted to designers, in a space where no one is actually seeking designers.
Sure, with declining sales, seeking to reinvent is a nifty idea, but this reminds me of the demise of Tandy Leather where they hired a bunch of fresh out of college business administrators who were all convinced that the next best thing was picture framing. Far too much of the floor space converted to something none of their customers were coming into the store for.
Add in ticking off the conservative customer with fishing for the gay dollar (like they'd be caught dead in JC Penny..) and it spells financial disaster. Still a great store for men's shirts, if you can stomach the gay ads and can actually find what's left of the men's section in the forest of storelets.
I figure another series of big yellow ‘store closing’ banners and another two quarters of disappointing results before they abandon this latest utter waste of financial resources and finally return back to their core demographic. But first, they'll again annoy the conservative market by aiming at the non-American market.
Why, oh why, do we need JC Penny's?
Losers are losers. It's how the cookie crumbles.
I'm the lazy-ass consumer slacker. No corporation is worth anything unless it makes my life one of ease and convenience. And that's the Bottom Line!
Besides the miserably failed attempt to attract higher end sales, the Penny’s shopper, of which my mom was one, gave value to people who work for a living.
There are what, 100,000,000 people NOT counted on the unemployment roles because they have “stopped looking” i.e., government euphanism for ~can’t find a job because there aren’t any~.
Until these people go back to work and companies are able to hire because the failed policies of the Obama admin are trashed, retail will continue to fail. Especially middle roaders like Penny’s and Sears.
I won’t attend a gay church (Episcopal), shop in a gun free zone (GoodYear) or shop in a store that promotes same sex marriage (JC Penny). Simple choices for me. You can believe what you want (I don’t care)...but don’t fret about not getting my hard earned money. But I do care when you do something that threatens my lifestyle and try to blame me for your failure. I hope all enjoy bankruptcy (as i said, I don’t care).
Apparently homos don’t by no-name, off the rack clothing. They prefer to shop at trendy, fabulous boutiques. But really, who knew? EVERYONE! Catering to the mentally ill just doesn’t seem to be a viable business model.
Another fabulouth quarter.
JCP bet that “gay was the way” and lost. And, still losing.
At one time their Arizona brand of clothing was real quality. Now, who cares?
I bet even gays didn’t flock to Penney’s when they “experimented with gay”
I will be sorry to see JCP go, they were the only main
go to source for my office work clothes. I do not shop
around -— i go in and buy the same brands (Dockers pants, Van heusen Shirts or Arrow) every 5 or 6 months. Colors may change a little on the shirts, but thats about it. JCP would
always have what i needed. I hate shopping. I go early on
a Friday morning when they open and i get out in 30 Min.
I tried other outlets for those brands and they usually dont
carry the breadth of those lines of clothes. I tried Kohls
and NEVER AGAIN because their same brand name line falls apart within 2 or 3 months from purchase. Macys carries some of same brands but not the depth that JCP does.
When J.C.Penny went PC and catered to the butt pirates, they lost the loyal base that kept them afloat. Maybe if they would align themselves with the NRA and Catholics and Baptists they may have a chance. They probably are like our US government and have so many lefties within their ranks they only know how to sink a ship, not keep it afloat.
One of the lessons to be learned here is how quickly poor management can ruin an organization.
You can stick a fork in JCP. They’re done. They hired an iPad salesman to run the company, and he tried to sell clothes like they were iPads.
Johnson’s worse sin was to nuke JCP sales and coupons. We could depend on all those discounts and coupons to add up and know we were getting good value.
Then Johnson nuked the brands we knew were good and durable. We knew we were getting good stuff. So now JCP no longer carried the things we wanted to buy.
Then Johnson turned the stores into a thicket of boutiquelets. Now we couldn’t FIND the stuff we wanted to buy (assuming it was there to begin with).
Then Johnson eschewed JCP’s demographic, and for some bizarre reason he decided it would be a capitol idea to offend many of us by catering to a teeny, tiny demographic, namely homosexuals.
Every one of those moves served to drive JCP’s multi-generational base of shoppers out of JCP stores forever. And that’s why JCP is done.
The damage is done and firing Johnson won’t bring back the old JCP. Nothing will. And even if they tried to bring back the old JCP exactly like it was, nobody would believe it.
And besides, everyone has already transferred their loyalty to other retail outlets; loyalty in this case meaning, “I’ve spent a lot of time and effort to find the stuff I want to buy at a place I like to shop at; I finally found that place and it has what I want, and it has it at a fair price, and every time I go back, they STILL have the stuff I want at a fair price, so I’m done wasting time shopping around: I’ll just keep coming back there.” And that’s what JCP has lost and that’s what JCP will never get back. Ever.
I agree with the Freeper who said JCP would be gone before Obama. However, I don’t understand what Soros is up to. It has to be some kind of pump and dump scheme, because a big retail chain has value only because of three things:
1. Customer goodwill. That’s gone.
2. Real estate. JCP real estate is probably not worth squat in this economy. Almost all of it will sit empty for a very long time after Chapter 7.
3. Savvy management and loyal, capable employees. And both of those groups are long, long gone from JCP.