On April 14, 1902 James Cash Penney the founder and two partners opened the Golden Rule dry-goods store in the small town of Kenner, Wyoming. In 1907 Penney bought out his original partners and took on new ones, beginning with Earl Corder Sams. When the firm was incorporated on January 17, 1913 as JC Penny Stores Company, there were 34 stores in the American West. Penney then moved the company’s main headquarters to New York. Today Penny’s is engaged in marketing apparel, home furnishings, jewelry, cosmetics, and cookware. With all those things and for many years JC Penny has been a great retail store to buy your home goods. And in recent events there has been many bad decisions that have brought Penny’s into a financial bad place. Bring in Ron Johnson, not communicating with their strategy, and not having a good strategy plan.
JC Penny former CEO Ron Johnson went bold on his attempted rescue of the fading retailer, but his top to bottom makeover failed. After successful plans at Target, it seemed Ron Johnson could do no wrong. But the winning streak came to a well-publicized end during his two year run as CEO of JC Penny, when everything he tried seemed to backfire. During that time sales one year fell 25 percent, resulting in a net loss of $985 million, when Johnson took over Penny’s 50 to 70 percent of all sales were at discounted prices. The problem that high low pricing cause are huge. The customer like the merchandise, but do not like the price, and nobody buys. As a result to thru new merchandise sits on shelves. The depths of the recession made this everyday low prices strategy difficult to carry out. Customer’s traffic dropped sharply, and without that, JC Penny and Johnson were clearly in trouble. If customers had more disposable income and felt better about the future, Johnson might have had more time to work things out three years instead of two. Finally what made it worse was when back to school season came around and the holidays....