

JC Penney ousts CEO Ron Johnson - velodrome
http://news.yahoo.com/jc-penney-ousts-ceo-ron-020924276.html

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qasar
After spending 2 years of my life in a retail turnaround backed by an activist
investor (Eddie Lampert at SHLD), I can't say i'm that surprised.

This game of retail is much harder than it looks from afar. Certainly much
harder than working at places like Google or Apple - mainly because the market
forces are against you. You're working with low margins, high capex,
deteriorating infrastructure, deflated brands, legacy technology and a legacy
customer base. To top it off, the shear momentum of companies this large (at
SHLD we had 300,000 employees) is alone hard to grapple with even if you
didn't have market forces against you. It's a daunting task.

If non-linear equity growth was easy, everyone would be doing it. Turnarounds
are not for the weak of heart. Turnarounds in that sense, are actually similar
to startups.

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dredmorbius
For others who are curious: SHLD: Sears Holding Company.

Turnarounds are like startups, but with legacy: customers, employees, vendors,
systems. Much harder in many ways.

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joelrunyon
Earlier submitted article + discussion here -->
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514971>

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fusiongyro
This article has some background:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/03/jcpe...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/03/jcpenney_ron_johnson_came_from_apple_to_reinvent_j_c_penney_and_ended_up.html)

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RougeFemme
From a strictly consumer point of view, I loved what he did. I loved the one
low price concept, with an occasional sale. I hated "do you have the coupons?
walk over to the door and. . ." or "you would have saved an extra 15% if you
had been here at 0-dark-thirty". I know I'm in the minority among shoppers and
retail would did if everyone were like me, but just give me a price I like and
I'll either buy it or not.

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VLM
"I know I'm in the minority among shoppers"

Vast minority among people who count shopping as a hobby, yet vast majority of
the population. This is like the TV narrowcasting phenomena where a "success"
is 2% of the population being rabid hyper fans and 98% of the population not
even willing to watch for free, or to a lesser extent FPS video games.
Hyperoptimization to a small group guarantees lack of large group/total
population success.

Locally a regional competitor Kohls and national player JCP fight pretty hard
for literally generations over who wins the "my hobby is shopping for womens
clothes" crowd. The other 95% of the population, like us, go to Target,
walmart, pretty much any place else. Dropping the hobby shoppers means they
lose whatever fraction of the 5% they used to have, plus the 95% have been
marketed for generations not to shop there. I certainly have not set foot in a
JCP over the past 14 months. Given a couple years I might have been convinced
to try it, but...

You can't turn around a business model that has been marketed for over a
generation. If Pepsi decided to skip all this HFCS cola stuff and ship canned
apple cider, its going to take a lot longer than 14 months or whatever this
guy had. The startup lesson is its much easier to pivot into something
entirely new, like a desktop/laptop computer company going into portable music
players and then pivoting again into phones, or a search engine giant going
into webmail and then into phones.

For some tech examples of rough pivots that are just too close to home to
succeed, think of ebay trying to turn themselves into a poor copy of amazon by
driving away all the small/individual sellers, or craigslist trying to turn
themselves into a poor copy of ebay instead of being the wild west of
classified ads.

Closer to home "hacker news" could probably pivot into a daily tech video
newscast feed, but it would be hopeless to try to pivot into a poor clone of
digg/reddit. (LOL have some "hacker news gold" for your post, or maybe we'd
use BTC LOL)

Could Walmart pivot into an upscale bespoke merchant of $2500 mens suits? Not
a chance, too close. Could they pivot into being car dealers or check cashing
bankers? Sure! In fact that's probably a good idea.

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fusiongyro
You're so right. In fact, Walmart actually already does cash checks.

<http://www.walmart.com/cp/Check-Cashing/632047>

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panacea
Selling clothing at a retail store isn't the same thing as selling Apple
devices at an Apple store? Huh. I thought profession was more important than
understanding an industry.

