How J.C. Penney Fell From the Top of Retail | WSJ
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- čas přidán 18. 05. 2020
- J.C. Penney rose to prominence as a national retailer by dressing the middle class for over a century. But analysts say the retailer’s costly shifting strategies have failed to attract the modern middle-class customer, leading the company to declare bankruptcy. PHOTO: RICHARD B. LEVINE/LEVINE ROBERTS/ZUMA PRESS
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#WSJ #JCPenney #RiseAndFall
They’re bankrupt, yet they magically found a way to give their executives $10 million in “bonuses” a full year early. Corporate Greed.
After that news hits mainstream, J.C. Penny will be dead store walking, if not already. I really dislike those corporate tards.
JCP BOD and executives need to be held accountable for their fraudulent BK filing. They have no significant debt coming due until 2023, therefore BK wasn’t their only option. They could have sold some of their stores, if they needed cash, outside of BK.
and they pay their employees minimum wage.
When someone as old as I am considers your clothes to be outdated and something my grandmother would have worn (before she passed away of old age....) you're doomed.
Exactly. Whoever seeks out the clothes they sell is awful
Didn't embrace online and hired CEO's who had no experience in the industry.
Online was always there, it was no brainer.
Hired an Apple phone exec to run clothing store??!! Then hired a Home Depot exec to sell appliances??!! Sounds like someone guessing letters on wheel of fortune rather than proper clothing business management.
@@osowers6755 They were following Trump failing strategies ... bankruptcies back to back, lying about their taxes, running the country without knowing WTH was doing 😂😂😂🤷🏽♀️
@@amarigonzalez8425 I worked in JC Penney call center for catalog orders back in 1986. There were calls from all over the world; people ordering items for Christmas, clothes, home furnishings, curtains, toys, etc. You name it. Sad to see they couldn't keep up with the progress in online competition. They were once big in their heyday, amd would have made James Cash Penney proud. I wish they could have made a comeback.
The fall of JCP is directly related to the fall of the middle class... as the poor/working class increased in numbers so did Walmart and Amazon and those few upper class Americans only shop with high end retailers
Yes exactly! It’s symbolic that jcpenny historically catered to the middle class Americans... the fact that it has fallen is in direct relation to the middle class of America disappearing!
@@camerontaylor7471 I would mostly blame on taxation. We all try to tax the “rich” but in return we killed the middle class. The rich have been and always will be avoiding taxes. I considering myself middle class and taxation is killing me. I work as an engineer but making barely more than I was at Amazon warehouse because of taxes.
Basically they wasted time and money with bad ceos that were completely out of touch with their customers
Very true. Speaking from experience of meeting Mrs. Jill face to face no personality for retail.
Pretty simple....Bill Ackman and Ron Johnson
The coronavirus was the nail in the coffin. JCPenney was falling apart anyways.
Starch25 yes so true
true
I used to work at jcpenney.... the management at my store tried to run it like middle school....
How so?😊
They lost touch with their audience. Sad to see Penny's be like this.
i love my JCpenny im 23 yrs old...i have been shopping there since i was small....and i like my JCpenny cuz it was quiet and calm and i like shopping in peace...and i love the clothes...and im a man
The truth is, there IS no more middle class in modern times...and they failed to adopt online services in time.
CharlieMason the fact that, people can make a full outfit with 30$ spent online doesn’t help companies like these
Yet there is a higher and lower class to be found.
The one in my town closed. No one wears Arizona jeans and they had the worlds worst selection of shoes. Just saying.
And old lady secretary clothes
They had nice flannels
Yeahh those shoes are hideous
I was a four year man at JCP 2011 - 2015. The store I worked at had some of the best employees and highest quality displays of any of the stores in the area. We sold and sold day after day and always maintained the appearance of the store from front to back - it was truly quality. JCP stock increased to the low $40s when it was announced that Ron Johnson was taking over (Nov 2011). After he was placed officially into his position in about late March of 2012, the store suffered from an evaporation of customers. It seemed more like a Walmart in terms of pricing structures, and all the exclusive deals took a hike to Mars. He then eliminated commission-based earning and sales weren’t as focused and as high as before in shoes, menswear, and jewelry. Investor Bill Ackman soon expressed his disdain for Johnson, and investor confidence in JCP started to fall. The online store had considerable volume, but between Macy’s, Kohl’s, and other similar hybrid retailers, the volume wasn’t enough to return the company to profitability; too much choice leads to too much market dilution and subsequent monetary shortfalls. The stock continued sliding down and hasn’t ever approached pre-2012 levels. I hope the talks on the long term debt restructuring will help to assist the remaining employees and put the extant retail space to a decent use, as in a real estate leasing program, to recoup losses. JCP is a great company in its products and services, but competition is astronomical today.
Jill soltau gave herself a 4.5 billion dollar bonus for failing. Meanwhile 90 000 employees aren't even getting crumbs. Anything wrong with this scenario?
4.5 million, not billion. Still, the whole American corporate culture of rewarding execs for failure is disgusting.
Feel like I'm watching a shorter CNBC mini doc
Sad to walk around my towns mall and see stores like JC Penny's, Dillard's, and Sears looking either abandoned or well on their way
Last year i bought lots of clothes online when i discovered it was cheaper than walking into the store and picking out outfits in person. I loved the pickup today option. Then i ordered a bed set that never showed up and couldn't be replaced. It was a huge mess and they fought me for months as to whether i should wait to do the "return" everyone gave me the run around. i did try to just buy stuff that was avaliable at my store after that. However i discovered you have to specifically ask key questions or they don't give you the discount percent off that the website automatically tells you about. My local store was ripping people off
And behavior like that is why stores fail.
Because the clothes are ugly they are using polyester or rayon rarely really cotton!
I don’t like their brand.. their styles are old fashion and make you look older than you’re 😂..
@@Hilda-mg4gf Closing sentences with an abbreviated word is my pet-peeve, it's just wrong
@@nikolairomanov8316 what are you talking about? 🤔
@@Hilda-mg4gf it’s basically something that triggers them
Also you’re = you are (abbreviation)
@@monkeybandit222 I don’t have to be proper to make you happy... don’t forget this is the media not a college English class so MYOB HUN... Good Night
It’s a shame to see how many retailers are struggling - a sign of things to come.
IMHO JCPenney’s situation is the culmination of about 20 years of poor choices starting with the move to centralized buying, elimination of sales staff and sore merchandise teams, ravaged their private label team, no more advertising just % off broad categories of merchandise, size scales for 1980’s bodies and lowering their standards on merchandise quality. Online is great and all but if what you are offering doesn’t resonate with your customer they won’t buy from you regardless of channel.
Their $10 off coupon was what made me come back often. Man, I got a lot of their clothes for next to nothing !
@Davy Jones Locker They're going to have another fire sale literally if they go belly up entirely and close up shop 😆
I currently work for jcpennys in the state of Missouri our store hasn't been open since the shut down . I will be surprised if we open back up .before the shut down I've seen so much theft and we are not allowed to stop these people or say anything to them. Not to mention not to many people were shopping at my store location before the shut down .
Ron Johnson single handedly destroyed JCPenney. His tenure was a disaster. The Company went from having half a billion in reserves to almost one billion debt and sales went down by 35% during his tenure.
last time I went the mens department got smaller. everyone caters to women. I guess I'm running out of places to shop.
Men’s don’t buy a lot clothes. Women is more profit.
We can’t afford department stores.
It's like j.c.sears. it's depressing and sad
why would they hire someone from the tech world to run their clothing business???
pricila incompetence
Was the best chain for clothes. I'll miss them. Shopping for clothes online sucks. Target or Walmart, allowed to stay open, will now get the business JcPenny would have enjoyed...
I have gone to my local JC Penney about 10 times in 10 years. I am frustrated with them because they only have 2 pairs of my jeans in stock and my size is a standard size. They offer to order more for me but I can order online myself. Last time my wife and I looked through racks there I felt like I was at a garage sale. Racks were junk clothes and shelves were pricey designer clothes above my style. I was looking for good quality basic clothes and could not find anything. I hope the best for them and would love to see JC Penney pull out of the slump. I want to shop there more if they would stop the gimmicks and just sell decent clothes for decent prices.
Hopefully they don’t go bankrupt. I love this store and I would love to see it bounce back again to how it was in its best days!!
When I think of Penny’s I think of my grandma and out dated, non-fashionable clothing. With stores like Target and TJ Maxx being ultra trendy, Penny’s should have changed their Grandma image.
Thank you!! So out of date
Agreed, but TJ Max, Ross, etc are all gross heavily trafficked and picked thru discount stores.
The JCP store near me (Salinas, Calif.) has survived every closure so far. We'll see if it will survive this one, too.
CNBC makes a video on The Rise and Fall of JC PENNEY.
Ackman & Icahn is nowhere in the books
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
Please Penney's don't go away.
Why do you guys always say a store fails to be on Online and that’s why they fail? When TJ Maxx, Marshall’s and homegoods propers?
We just want quality clothes. I tried to go last year for a holiday outfit and everything was cheaply made from China. Nothing trendy, everything was for grandma 😒
0:26 I find it so weird watching this. That JCPenny is within walking distance from where I live, I just take the Q29, to get there even faster.
It's strange for me, because I just immigrated to America, and I always see so many places in New York City being featured, and now I live in New York City.
the company man channel has a good video on this too
It seem like most of these once great companies fail is because they made the wrong hires at the top management. Wasting precious money and time.
JC Penny and Sears give me nostalgia from being dragged as a child to the mall. It was great
Over priced outdated clothing . Last time i walked into one they had huge amounts of boomer type clothing priced outrageously high with poor quality. Im not paying 50 bucks for 1 ill fitting, out dated, poor quality sweater when i can get several decent fitting, decent quality ones for 50 bucks at target, amazon, or walmart.
Did anyone notice @0:27 it said corona on the JCPenney store and the coronavirus is what caused it to go bankrupt
Many years ago, the quality of clothing and window treatments was pretty good. The last few years, the quality was really bad. Cheap acrylic and threads hanging off items. I will say that the bath and window treatments is still okay.
It’s sure more than one factor. From rise of Amazon to the decline of middle class. But they had serious issues with their customer service as well. I will never forget this one time I took my elderly mom there for shopping. It took us literally 30 minutes to find a cashier. Dozens of women with heavy makeup and fake smiles walking around but none of them was available to help us. And when we finally found one, she was busy helping someone who was returning almost 3 or 4 bags of clothes. Kohl’s does a much better job with overall store layout and customer services.
Collectively losing between $100-200million nearly every quarter for 5 years in a row! And the CEOs still get paid? What did they do? How can you justify your exemplary management skills with the actual business results?
My mom use to shop there until Target and Walmart came along. They had better prices while shopping for five school aged kids. When Penny's realized what was happening it was too late.
me, a current jcpenny associate: not shocked
Make execs return their bonuses that they gave themselves before filing for BK. Execs need to be charged with fraud.
I worked a penneys and let me tell you, corporate is full of arrogant people. District managers do NOT have good relationships with their employees (at least in my case). Managers that work at the store are overpaid to do the same exact work as the employees. Some aspects were good, they were always flexible with scheduling. I worked on the dock so it wasn’t a terrible job but I got paid $10 an hr while the operation manager got $20 an hour for literally doing the same work. Opening boxes
The same way jc penney fell apart, the US will do, it is just matter of time.... tic toc tic toc tic toc
In all honesty, JCPenney’s most recent wave of changes would’ve worked if they acted before Macy’s and Nordstrom did. They were too reactionary, and never thought of ways to differentiate themselves (think premium food courts, strategic collaborations with big labels & such).
Speaking from experience Ron Johnson was the beginning of the end for JCPenney.
JC Penney lost it's glow with apparel especially with dowdy selections and unrealistic prices for the quality it had. Excellent sales though. Loved their sales. Yes. After reading other comments...their online presence was antiquated, slow & difficult to use.
With the erosion of the middle class, the erosion of the middle classes capital in which to use to purchase goods and services caused many companies to declare bankruptcy.
Failure to adapt to online purchasing culture as well as out of touch upper management were the final nails in J.C. Penny’s coffin.
The fall of JCP realy accelerated about 2010 or 2011. They managed them selves to death. We started with a store that had quality in house brands and carried other well made clothing. The range of sizes was excelant. The prices were resonable.
Then expensive management is bought in to fix it? The Image of the store had to be improved new more modern styles were brought in, but what realy happened?
The quality of the clothing began to drop. The very good in house lines began to be replaced first with other good brands then with junk. Before you could walk in and find a range of sizes and walk out with something that day that fits. Now the range of sizes is inconsistent. No mediums in that one, no smalls in that one, no size 6, and next week its some other sizes they don't have. If you realy want it you have to come back again. Then the quality of the clothing dropped no one realy notices seams that split and things that wear out right away. Sizes in packaged things was inconsistent. The same size 12 sock in the same package was a significantly different size three times for me. When you allow your supplier to put what ever size on a garment to fillout an order and you don't know or care that is a problem. Then the pricing about 2010 pr 2011 a huge jump in prices followed shortly by a low price campaign. The new low prices were significantly higher than the base line prices a few weeks before. The prices were higher than competitors for equal or better merchandise. JCP thought no one would notice.
I read the other comments. Change for change sake is not the same as improvement. Improvement is keeping what is working and carefully adding to it. I don't think keeping up with all the new styles was the huge problem you suggest. It was part of the problem but the majority of what they sold was very similar to what people are wearing every day. The decline or disappearance of the middle clasa is not the problem. I don't see alot of one time middle class people running arround naked, do you. They still have wear clothing
Management is the problem paying premium amounts of money to some one who will smash and grab then move on to another top management position and get more premium pay isn't an improvement.
Too many C-suites in 'Murica living in an ivory tower at the helmet, whose view on pop culture is condescending. Next!!
The frozen yogurt of the clothing retail industry.
The 1977 catalog was a classic, though. 😎
I did not know how much they changed their branding over the years!
Last year I used to work for JC PENNEY’S for a few months. I can’t believe that that store is going bankrupt!!!
Sam Walton ( Walmart founder) worked for James Cash Penny...literally trained his replacement
Actually just made a video about ways the world will change, it's sad seeing so many stores will close end of year, but same time, really shows how much things will start going online as time moves, esp after this year
I worked there for 3 years. They just sent me a letter talking about bankruptcy. I had put my 2 weeks notice like a week ago cause I haven’t worked
I prefer getting most clothes from a brick and mortar store - it helps to try it on, examine it. Ultimately JC Penny should've leaned into what they did well and embrace the online marketplace sooner. Deals and online. Its so dumb they sold appliances.
HN okay. But when your clothes don’t fit properly, sometimes it’s more expensive to send the garment back to the company so you end up with a pile of ill fitting clothing.
They have online. It's the women's size charts that were the problem. Had to buy Junior's clothing, but it looked like already passed trends smashed together. Vanity sizing makes their XS as big as a Large...literally.
It's not Kem-merer is pronounced Kemmer. The original JC Penney's is still there. it's small and expensive, but the only clothing store in town.
I worked for JCP before the pandemic and they pay us very poorly for what we do. They don’t treat their employees right. We are super understaffed all the time because they don’t want to pay to have a lot associates scheduled for the day. That means we have to do 3 different people’s jobs all the time. For example, 1 person has to take care of 3 departments during their shift. Also, they are very wishy washy with the hours they give (only 10-15 per week) because they are so cheap. My store was very high in crime but they only had an asset protection person there once every two weeks because they don’t want to pay their employees. People would steal from us 3-4 times per day but they wouldn’t hire anyone to fill the position which prevents that. It’s no surprise to me that they went bankrupt.
People aren’t going out so there is no point shopping for outfits. Underwear is where the future is at 🤗
Open JCPENNEY I guarantee people will come back 👍🏼
"Bad sound makes good video look bad." (She made zero effort to avoid the bad built-in mike sound made worse with the terrible room acoustics.)
Lol I literally kept saying ....”I’m sorry, WHAT?!” As I kept turning the volume up on my phone. She had zero interest being in this video😂
I always hated shopping there. ESPECIALLY when I was transitioning from teen to young a adult. It was either you are 13 or you are 56. No in between ages with clothes.
Horrible management.
I really feel for the employees who gave years of their lives to this company because in the end they will be the ones who lose the most.
Another Sears I guess. This is the direction retail is taking. E-commerce is taking over.
They’ve gotten cheap over the years
I took the title to seriously
Bad management, poorly treated employees. They fired over 600 people only to hire people overseas. The online is a joke and way behind the times. What's sad is most of those managers that had a part in the downfall of JCPenney have gotten big bonuses and moved on to other retailers.
I shopped there a few times but I heard it had something to with the coupons.
They should have closed down 20 to 30 years ago
There are way better stores than JCPenney.. Nordstrom rack clothing is great quality, has good clearance and great brands. Something that JCPenny doesn't have
It's sad to stores are closing it a good place to buy.Wishing more could bring them back.I Tryed to get a book .Some of don't have a computers.Some was high price there sales are good.Its to bad everything is on line I'm the old way.Sorry for everyone.
tell me why I thought this was a story about a girl named penny falling to her death in one of those mutliple story malls
A CEO like Hermann Cain (who headed GodFather Pizza) could have saved he company.
Where is company man when you need him
Never heard of Arizona Jeans.
I like to go to mall and see sears and jcpenny I think it's the people on top how take the money
They are the biggest stores in most malls I wonder what will happen to malls after that
It fell bcs of the Return policy, a policy I did not agree too, bcs I saw how much money it was being rob out of the value of the clothing. So All of my savings I had to put in stock and saving, I took them all out, bcs I saw the fall of Jcp at stake, Even when I try to save it with ideas, in which are being process in now, it could of been done yrs ago when the market had higher value. Their is more that company could of done but it mistake was not valuing its real assets. 😉
Well at least we still have Sears ~ oh wait...
Nobody shopped there because of the brands they carried.. they carried old and outdated clothes nobody wants.. you have to provide products that consumers want and they didn’t have them. The only thing they had going for them was Sephora
They had a buy one get two pair of boots recently. That was stupid!
They changed the whole design of the store. It waz a turn off. Looked strange
Why does it say CORONA at :29 right beside GARDENS???????
Maybe that's the mall in a city named Corona, like Corona, CA. Maybe the word "Corona" is in the name of the mall. Maybe there's a store in the mall named Corona. Maybe that's the entrance on the Corona Avenue/Street/Drive side of the mall. The word "corona" wasn't just invented in December 2019.
@@tltinatl It's funny how they picked a store called Corona for the photo
@@JasonLee-lb5qi Probably the person who picked the stock photos for the video trying to be clever and see if anyone caught it. Good eye, I didn't even notice.
I will miss J C Penny and Sears. You walk in try on an article of clothing and ask yourself do I like this color and fit. If you do you buy it and go home a happy customer. Order something from Amazon and half the time something is wrong with it and I end up returning the item. I hate to return stuff, don't you? Very soon we won't have a choice of going to a sticks and brick store or ordering on line. When that day happens we will miss J C Penny and Sears and many others. I already do.
JC Penny lost steam years ago. Nobody I know including myself have never shopped at JC Penny. I’m not bashing them. I’m just saying I don’t know a single person who shopped there ever.
Ditto! It’s been so irrelevant!
Filing for Chapter 11 'debt reduction' and then coming back bigger better and stronger even after $11.2 billion in net sales for fiscal 2019 ? You betcha.
-i like your dress btw. where'd u get it?
-oh this?....jc penney
-................
-$9.98 after my $2 coupon
-well i'm gonna go clean up dinner now
-...............😒
so like j.c. penney every l retail brand should hire a ceo from a computer technology company
whaaaat a middle class department store lost popularity as the middle class evaporated? I'm shocked.
Did Mrs Obvious get her microphone at JC Pennys??
I hope JC Penney open back ?
thank amazon