It’s back to business as usual at JC Penney this week with the departure of Apple golden boy Ron Johnson and the re-instalment of its previous CEO Mike Ullman.
Sadly for this US national institution business as usual means sliding profits and sacking employees as they continue down the long road to insolvency and obscurity.
The markets reacted comically to the decision, sending up a cheer as the news of the ex-retail VP of Apple was relieved of his post, with shares growing by 10 per cent, and then dropping back down when it was announced who was to replace him.
Johnson joined JC Penney fresh from helping to turn Apple into the most profitable company in the world but he failed to bring this same Apple magic to the department store.
It’s almost as if people bought Apple products because everyone thought they were cool to have, not because of the store locations and opening hours.
Indeed, people would still have bought Apple stuff even if they could only get it from the top of some mountain in the middle of nowhere on the night of a full moon. In fact, the launch day queues might have been even longer.
As he has proved from his resounding failure at JC Penney, Johnson got lucky at Apple. If his strategy at Apple as VP of retail operations would have been to lock the doors on all the outlets and turned out the lights.
I’m not trying to deny Johnson did a good job while he was at Apple, the Apple Stores around the world are a landmark in any city that’s lucky enough to have them. The point is that a child could have held the position and still sold a bazillion iPods and Macbooks since the turn of the century.
Johnson got the JC Penney job because of his successful stint at Apple. Just because someone held a job at Apple in the time of the second coming of Jobs doesn’t automatically mean they’ll be able to sell anything to anybody.
JC Penney (like a lot of other companies) needs to stop trying to emulate Apple as a way to success and try something of their own. Admittedly, for a business model as out-dated as a department store this is far easier said than done.
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