Except there was a fix for the pipe: planning and organization that, say, might have allowed to slowly turn off the water, or plan on who would use it certain times so it could be left at a trickle...

But I think that’s the point of how stupid our lack of a national response is. We’re seeing places open up to insane degrees. No longer requiring masks and distancing, even.

I saw someone on Twitter put it like this: we shut off the water to fix a broken pipe, but now we are turning the water back on without bothering to actually fix the pipe.

This is your regular reminder that planning and organization in the leadup to this, when we all could see what was coming, likely would have mitigated the effects, at least of the shutdowns if not the disease itself. Particularly with the executive branch of the federal government, which in all but the most…

the two times I’ve called police for something other than a DUI (which could be ANYONE’S life that is saved, drunk drivers don’t care the race of the minivan full of people they hit), it was to PROTECT a person of color— one was a woman in a DV incident, started the 911 call when he slapped her, by the end of the…

I didn’t realize the department stores had their own branded electronics. It makes sense though once I think about it.

Service Merchandise? Damn, haven’t heard that name dropped since Grandma dropped ...

console TV ... damn that’s ancient.  Did it have the AM/FM/8-track built in one side and the turntable in the other.  And you always had to move the stuff on top if  you ever wanted to listen to anything.  And it always smelled like Lemon Pledge ‘cause damn, that was a living room center piece and it needed to shine.

I’m old enough to remember when you couldn’t buy shit like that at a department store like Sears or Monkey Wards; in those days, electronics came branded with the store’s name, and were typically awful. I had a friend who had a Montgomery Ward boom box and it was beyond shit.

I think you’re right on the money in your analysis. Fashion and modes of consumption have changed dramatically since the Penny’s/Sears/Wards heyday of 4-6 decades ago.

I went to a college advertising capstone presentation about 10 years ago, their ‘client’ was J.C. Penney. There were actual representatives from J.C. Penney there too, they were looking for innovative ways to bring back their relevance and it was interesting the variety of ways these students suggested improvements -…

Most people in younger generations do not want their “mother’s” ... anything when it comes to personal expression. They don’t want their mother’s house, they don’t want their mother’s fashion, they don’t want their mother’s dishes... and so on. People think of Millennials as these silly youngsters that like avocado…

The quality of the merchandise is not great. I’m older, (not millenial) but I don’t dress like Grandma, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in the stuff they sell.

This is so on point - people love to talk about the ‘death of retail’ but retail is actually thriving in places where people have money to spend. I work in apparel, and the gap in performance between the top ~100 or so locations for any given retailer vs. the rest of the fleet is a reflection of income inequality…

Yeah I’m honestly just completely baffled that online shopping wasn’t brought up at all most brick and mortar stores are going bankrupt- payless, k-mart, Albertsons- the only ones that are seemingly in good shape are Walmart which got on the online shopping train pretty early and is just too massive to buckle…

I bought a Discman!

The author seems to have the words “can’t” and “want” confused. The whole idea of JC Penney’s slow death being as a result of a dying middle class (as proposed by this article) is dependent on the notion that people can’t shop there (for financial reasons).

which is flat-lining because the middle class itself is at death’s door

While the middle class is falling JC Penney’s death is hardly an indication of that. It is an example of a company failing to adapt its image and business model for the modern post internet world. You are trying to force a narrative.

I would head into our local JC Penny here and there when I wanted to go to Sephora. A while back, if you walked around and looked at their merchandise, they had some great brands and lots of items of very good quality, and it was reasonably priced.
Then, the problem I saw was first off, instead of sticking with their…