- C. Penney will close over 130 stores (probably 140) and they will let go 6000 people, things are really bad right now. People are buying niche, people are buying online and JCP never adopted to this new model. I think things will get much more bad very soon for JCP – more stores will be closed, and at some point the company will simply go bankrupt and will go away.
So, now there are 1000 JC Penney stores around, if they close 140, that will be 14% or 15% of the overall count of open stores. This will have to reflect to the corporate office, they will probably cut 20% of people in the corporate office. Look around, Macy’s melting down, Sears is all but done, both are closing stores almost every month and more and more people are laid off, this includes 3PL companies and corporate folks as well.
So, now when it comes to store closings, Macy’s axed over 100 stores (out of 7000) and Sears nixed 150 stores, Kmart closed over 100. It’s a bloodbath with stores closing every day, it’s very hard to keep up with what’s being closed and where. Ellison can try to slow the process down, but he will not be able to stop it. If you look at the overall store count, we had 1100 in 2008, but we only had 1000 in 2016. In short, this tells you that there were too many stores competing for a dropping number of customers (as they started shopping online). Also, don’t forget that a ton of new companies showed up like H&M that are cutting into sales – even Levi’s started to open stores of their own and the best products were pitched there in a fun and cool environment.
This brings me to the next steps – the most affected folks will be the ones who will be included in the "voluntary early retirement program” – I feel really bad for those folks as many have invested many years into this, some have worked in decades, and they are now losing jobs.