As far as most people are concerned, JCPenney, over 100 years old and once the largest retailer in America, has been gone for years. Like Sears and Kmart, it was buried by Walmart and Amazon. But the retailer’s CEO is speaking on CNN about how tough the environment is for retailers. (Customers are abandoning these 25 brands.)
[in-text-ad]
JCPenney is in a bad enough state that a tough retail environment could cripple the tiny company again. “In 2022, Two of its landlords, Simon Property Group and Brookfield, bought it out of bankruptcy for a cash payment of less than $700 million plus new term debt,” according to industry news outlet Retail Dive. Although the company does not release data about financials or store counts, JCPenney has over 600 stores. That is many fewer than the 5,000 or so that Walmart has.
[nativounit]
JCPenney CEO Marc Rosen says his company serves working-class families. Despite a recovering economy, those working-class families are in trouble—inflation, he says, is the enemy of its customers. “That’s tough for a family like that because it means they’re making tradeoffs in everything that they can do,” he told CNN.
[wallst_email_signup]
JCPenney is in the middle of making $1 billion in improvements to its stores. However, it may be too late for that to matter. If Rosen is right, people who shop at JCPenney are already stretched economically to a breaking point.
[recirclink id=1303323]
Since inflation is receding, there is something about Rosen’s analysis that does not make sense unless the working class is affected more by inflation than others are. JCPenney may be the weather vane that shows this is true.
JCPenney Makes a Comeback
© JCPenney (CC BY 2.0) by Mike Mozart
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks