I love their Sag Habour line. One of these days I’m going to drift across a lake wearing one of their light fabric skirty skirts and kicky-kind-of-hats, in my leisure. I just know it.
Great clothing great
I believe rumors of Ullman leaving already are being driven by Bill Ackman. Ullman was brought on as interim CEO and I believe there has technically been an ongoing search for a permanent CEO for the entirety of his tenure…but Bill Ackman is pressuring the board to fire Ullman now and replace him with yet another Ackman candidate (I’ve yet to hear who he is backing.)
Ackman is a tool, and his activist investing style looks to be going very poorly for him and his hedge fund. For those not familiar with Ackman he’s a billionaire hedge fund manager whose M.O. is taking large (but not controlling) stakes in corporations and then using his sizable minority stake to influence the company to do things he wants. As he would sell it, he basically uses the media and the public to “leverage” non-controlling interest in publicly traded companies so that he can get the board to do things he wants and “unlock shareholder value.” This strategy has some compelling features, the biggest of which is that “when it works” he is able to influence an entire company without having to actually take a majority stake in it. He basically tries to get the benefits from controlling a board without having to pony up the cash.
In practice I think what he seems to really do is create a culture in which boards fearful of controversy acquiesce to him and then you have companies become obsessive over quarterly earnings reports. This guy basically believes as a hedge fund manager he is more equipped to know who should run a company like JCP or Procter & Gamble than the professional managers who actually run those businesses. While both of those companies have had weak executive leadership probably the last thing either needs is a hedge fund manager trying to impose his management philosophies on them.
He appears to have had a giant baby-fit over the JCP board declining to fire Ullman after less than a quarter–threatening to sell his entire 18% stake in JCP. Of course he’s so deep in the red on that stake it’s not really a credible threat, he’s obviously locked in now unless he wants to eat massive losses.
It’s worth mentioning Ackman is 100% the source for the move to hire Ron Johnson in the first place and thus he can fairly be blamed for how bad the last year has been for JCP.
I find this all to be really sad. I used to love Penney’s. I bought tons of clothes there, and I had a Penney’s card for years. They used to carry Elizabeth (do they still carry it?) which was a cheaper but still nice offshoot brand of Liz Claiborne.
Then they decided to start carrying younger,“trendy” stuff. As someone else mentioned, it was perhaps a good business strategy, but it alienated me to the point that I no longer shop there. Now I go to Kohl’s, which I don’t like nearly as much as the Penney’s that once was.
JCP’s problem as I see it, is that they occupy a retail niche that’s being squeezed pretty hard from beneath.
When I was a boy, you had a 3 tiered structure for most retai (my examples are a mix of past and present; not all were present in 1970’s-1990’s Houston)
High-end department stores (Foley’s, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Sakowitz, Dillard’s).
Then you had mid-range department stores (Sears, JC Penney’s, Montgomery Ward),
Finally, you had the discount stores (K-Mart, Target, Wal-Mart)
Somewhat outside were the specialty shops (sporting goods, car repair, gourmet kitchen stuff, TV/electronics, cameras)
The high-end stores were pricey, the discount stores generally were reputed to have crap, but is where you went to get stuff like cheap toasters, or motor oil, or cheap sporting goods like balls, nets, inflator needles, etc…
Most people bought clothes at places in the middle, and also got stuff like appliances there as well.
The problem now is that between the high-end stores coming down in exclusivity, and the discount stores upping their game on the electronics and clothes, there’s not much space left for the mid-range stores.
In other words, what does JCP offer that’s substantially better than Target, or substantially cheaper than Macy’s? Nothing- they’re in an awful position of having quality and style of Target or Wal-Mart at low-end Macy’s prices. People who want Target style will pay Target prices, and people willing to pay low-end Macy’s prices won’t buy Target style from JCP.
In relevant news, Ackman has resigned from the board.
Well this is weird, since I thought Kohl’s was a much more successful chain than Penney’s:
They seem to be the only store that sells big/ tall clothes. I hope they don’t go out of business.
That article says that J C Penney still has 689 stores, and other articles say that Kohl’s has over a thousand. There are no J C Penney’s near me but there are Kohl’s stores, so I’ve been to them a few times a year. (And in recent years, Kohl’s has started a business of accepting Amazon returns, in the hopes of getting people in the stores.)
I want to know where the hell J.C. Penney got $8.6 billion to pay for Kohl’s. They reorganized out of bankruptcy in 2020, and the last two years haven’t exactly been great for retailers.
Since the thread has been revived–
Not many people know it, but JC Penny’s started out as the Walmart of its day. One of Sam Walton’s first jobs was at Penny’s, and he met Mr. Penny himself, who had a big influence on Walton. Penny taught Walton a lot of lessons about being a successful retailer.
Many of the criticisms of Walmart in the aughts were unknowingly recycled from battles against Penny’s in the 1920s.
The money is coming from Simon Property Group and Brookfield Asset Management, which together own J C Penney.