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Shrinking JC Penny?

A recent article on Motley Fool suggested JC Penny had a sq footage target for its stores that would shrink the store size down by 30K or more sq feet, on average.  The article also noted the challenges with that,  namely that all their locations are in malls where renovations and subleasing can get tricky and require the approval of the property managers.
Instead of shrinking the stores down JC Penny should do more partnering with other retailers that have struggled to maintain presence in malls and compartmentalize areas of their stores in to their own units.  I.E. 20 years ago every mall had a toy store, usually it was Kay Bee Toys in recent years it was Toys R Us Express, but now most malls have no toy stores.  JC Penny has the cash to buy the Kay Bee Toys name, build a few cubicle walls in an area of the store near the Sephora display and the Jewlery and purses and bring toys back to the mall.  Make it a separate business unit to JC Penny but still contributing to the JC Penny bottom line at the end of the day.

Of course, execution is a very important part of any plan so remodeling the JC Penny stores would need to be very carefully thought out to make this happen.  The core of JC Penny, ie clothes, should all go on one floor of the store, basically make the bottom floor of the store look and feel like a Khol's.  Then transform the top floor in to specialized nooks each branded with cool names that we kind of remember; sephora, Kay Bee Toys, Walden Books, ect.

What I am thinking in the ect column of options, those international snack food of the month boxes are really popular but what sucks about them is that when you find something you like in the box the 1 oz. packet is all you have with almost no hope of finding more of it.  JC Penny ought to either partner up with World Market and or SnackCrate.com to give people a store front where they can go to get a second helping.

JC Penny would be smart to keep their downstairs as the normal JC Penny merchandise we all know with a new and better store layout and turn the upstairs in to a fun mini outlet mall full of nostalgia and international exploration.

There is nothing actually wrong with JC Penny anymore, they fixed most of the problems they had, but they also haven't given anyone a good reason to come back and see that they have been making the store a good place to shop again.  Anything to generate buzz and foot traffic while cutting overhead costs and bring more fast moving merchandise in to the store would turn them around in a heart beat, and bring Kay Bee Toys back to the mall and introducing International Snack Company to the malls would certainly make it happen.

I own stock in JC Penny, not a lot though. 

Here is the original article from the Motley Fool.  https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/02/jc-penney-wants-smaller-stores-getting-there-will.aspx?source=iedfolrf0000001

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