Jcpenney Essay

Who is JC Penney in the landscape of retailers today? Is JC Penney a store of the future or a thing of the past?
JC Penney stores started as the brainchild of James Cash Penney in 1902 in Kemmer, Wyoming. Originally, JC Penney stores were small, local storefronts offering a variety of merchandise. Due to the store’s popularity and growth, the company quickly expanded and relocated their headquarters to New York City. In the span of 27 years, JC Penney grew to over 1,000 stores and went public. JC Penney “used to be a place where working class and upper middle-class families could buy good quality merchandise, at a fair price, with friendly sales people. It was stable, trendy, and reflected the growing affluence of the typical American

The stores now concentrated on clothing for the family and home furnishings. Although JC Penny attempted to adapt to this new trend, customers seemed to prefer high end or discount stores, relegating JC Penney to the mid-market. To assist in this shift, JC Penny brought in numerous highly compensated executives over the next several years to aid in their restructuring. During this time, there were store closings and employee layoffs, but this enabled the company to increase

They were now struggling to attract young people/young families into the stores. JC Penny’s image was that they were the store for the poor and the elderly. One effort to take the stores in a new direction was to lease store space to cosmetics retailer, Sephora. The hope was that this would attract young, female customers who would then shop in the other departments in the store.
• Changed marketing strategy - JC Penney changed a large part of who they were as a retailer in an effort to compete with other department stores. One such change that affected their core base of customers was discontinuing coupons in favor of everyday low prices. As JC Penney eliminated coupons, they alienated current customers before new customers had fully come on board and embrace the stores with their new concepts.
• Decreasing cash & high debt – JC Penney’s high operating debt coupled with their declining sales continued to erode their business. Sales at brick and mortar stores continued to decline in the wake of the introduction of online shopping and changing customer demographics. To date, the company has not fully recovered from the store closures and large severance packages paid to executives with their initial restructuring