The Forgettable Store
JC Penney is a huge corporation with stores all over the country. However, for some reason, they don’t give all their stores the same consideration. I worked at one of them and it seemed like our store was the forgotten store, as if they didn’t really care about it or what happened to it.
There were a few things they did care about though. Such as, ICAPs or soliciting credit cards, sales, shrinkage, and customer satisfaction. As far as ICAPs go, my store was pretty good at getting them. It really isn’t that hard to ask someone if they would like to open up a card but it can be disheartening when you hear no so much. Our sales didn’t go well which could be a contributing factor to them not worrying about our store. There were a lot of days that we were down and shrinkage is just horrible there. Everything seems to walk out of the store. But we were number one with customer satisfaction. I’m going to try to apply a SWOT analysis in order to come up with a solution for getting our sales up and our shrinkage down. We have to stop letting products just walk out the door.
I’m going to talk about the strengths first. Our store has some amazing people working for them and they are people who actually care and want to do a good job. If they used them more and gave them more hours they might see their sales go up. These are people who can get people to buy from the website online or suggest different clothes or products if we don’t have them. They wouldn’t let a possible sale leave the store without exhausting all of their efforts. They also have a training supervisor who could really train the new hires in realizing what importance a sale has to the store. In terms of shrinkage, they have an LP who does her job pretty well. She has caught plenty of people while I’ve been there and she knows how to handle a situation professionally.
Their weaknesses would have to be that they hire all high school kids who don’t really understand or care about the job. But they’re cheap labor. Their location in the mall could also be a weakness. They are sort of at one end of the mall and it would be better if they were in the middle so they would get hit with everyone. Having new merchandise so close to the door is definitely a weakness and it doesn’t always have ink tags on it.
They have plenty of opportunities to improve sales and the amount of shrinkage. For sales they could train people a little better in knowing the products so they can sell them. They could do a little more advertising in the mall with signs that might draw people in. They have signs right out the door but the store is in a corner and not everyone sees them. To improve the amount of shrinkage they could hire another LP that way if one has to take care of something the other can still watch the cameras. They could turn the alarms on so if someone walks out with an ink tag it goes off. They could hire people to take care of the fitting rooms and watch what people take in and take out. They could even make them locked so people have to ask to go in and show what they have.
The biggest threat they have is that they can’t afford to hire more people or do more training. They can’t afford to give more hours to those that are already great at their job but they hire new people at a lesser wage and give them hours since they are cheaper. But that is a big problem because then they make mistakes and don’t keep an eye on things. Then the people who are great at their job want to leave because they aren’t getting the hours they deserve. This in the end loses the company money because they aren’t pulling in the sales like they were.
If corporate would allow more budgeted hours for the entire store, they could hire a fitting room attendant to watch for shrinkage and another LP to assist the current one. It would probably cut down a lot of the shrinkage and possibly help the sales go up. Not only could they do that but they could afford to give the good people their hours that they want which would also bring their sales up. From the SWOT analysis I can conclude that the store may not do better if they don’t hire better people or keep the great people that they already have.
Jackie Bowers
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