Hurrah for Penney's!!!!

Have you ever opened up your mailbox only to have a plethora of coupons and papers and circulars and more coupons and more circulars, all touting BIG SALE 50% off, fall all over the street or the driveway or your front porch? It pisses me off. There I stand in the middle of the street in my business suit, my car running, and my butt sticking up in the air picking up all of this stuff that I neither requested nor wanted. Geez oh man, how many sales do they run? Macy’s is just one big sale, after sale, after sale. Come closer and I will show you where you can put that star.

Grocery stores are worse still. I HATE coupons!!! My wife and I both work full time, and have neither the inclination nor the time to sit around and figure out how to save 10 cents off a bottle of Prell. Do I really need a coupon to buy peanut butter?

And then there are those freakin’ loyalty cards. I had to have special pants made to carry all those cards in my wallet. All I want is a loaf of bread…where is your Giant Eagle card? All I want is a birthday card…where is your Hallmark card? All I want is some deodorant…where is your Walgreens card? All I want is a cup of coffee…where is your Dunkin Donuts card? All I want is some ink for my printer…where is your Staples card, and would you like to buy a package of paper for $5.00? NOOOOOO!!!!!!

But there is hope. A major retailer has seen the light, and in all seriousness, I wish them the best in the world and hope they make a killing. Penney’s has figured it out. It’s better to offer the merchandise at the lowest price they are able to sell it all of the time, than raise the price up 50% only to mark it down 20%, then 20% again, and spend a whole lot of money on advertising saying that you dropped the over inflated price.

Penney’s announced last week that it is lowering all of its store prices by at least 40% on a permanent basis. It will run very specific specials on regular days of the week, but the days of massive and continual sales are over. This makes sense to me, and actually is a sales technique used by Walmart.

Penney’s is revamping its “A” stores to make them more shopper friendly. It sent out a boffo catalogue last week that impressed the hell out of me. Classy and simple. The marketing strategy is being run by the same gentleman who ran the Apple retail stores, and he is using that template for Penney’s.

It works. I needed several pairs of shoes badly. Because I have a wide foot, I have to order my shoes on line (or as we said in the old days…by catalogue). I have been using Zappo’s, the online shoe retailer recently purchased by Amazon. Zappo’s used to offer fairly decent prices, but as of late not so much. The two pairs of Florsheim shoes I wanted were $145.00 through Zappo’s. I tried Reyer’s, and on line they were $105.00.

Then I thought about Penney’s. The website was a little slow because it was the first day after it announced its new pricing policy and it was “backed up.” But eventually I got through, and the shoes were $75.00/pair . Hurrah for me. Hurrah for the consumer. Hurrah for Penney's. It was like getting a two-fer, so I bought four pairs. And in my size!!!!!

I wish this is something that all stores would follow, especially grocery and drug stores. I am not so sure how long Penney’s will be able to hang in there with this sort of pricing policy at a store that is traditionally not a discount store. But I suspect that the bottom line of the store is going to jump. After the shoe experience, Penney’s will be the first place I look for staple clothing like shoes and Dockers and plain white shirts.

And I don’t need a loyalty card!!!!!!