The New JCPenney Looks A Lot Like The Old Grace Brothers

I got an email from the CEO of JCPenney.  I'm not important.  It's not like it was a personal email.  It was one of those emails the CEO of a large company sends when he or she wants to make hoi polloi feel all important and in the know about things happening in the huge corporation they head up.

So the deal with Penney's now, or jcp as they're branding themselves, is that instead of a department store in which you go to buy things, they've revised their stores to be a "collection of smaller shops" staffed with super-knowledgeable, specialized sales associates.  I get where they're going with this.  I suppose in the past, Penney's associates was that yesterday, they worked in home furnishings, today, they're bounced over to the cashwrap in Menswear, tomorrow, they'll be manning the jewelry counter.  It's hard to know everything about everything in the store, and by breaking the store into smaller, organized departments, and training up the staff to know their department inside and out, and not have them bouncing all over the store from day-to-day, Penney's will be able to deliver better service to its customers.

I think this probably is a great idea.  Nothing's more frustrating than having a question about a product in a certain department, asking the person in the store nametag who's hovering around in that very department, and getting a blank stare in return. 

Thing is, this doesn't sound so new to me. 

Remember that show "Are You Being Served?" that took place in Grace Brothers, a department store in London?  It was a fictional store on a Britcom, but I think it had a real-life antecedent in department stores all over London and even here in the States.  The characters on AYBS? were assigned to their own departments, mainly Menswear and Ladies' Ready Made.  They stayed in their own departments, knew their wares inside and out, and none of them was bounced all over the store.  There was an episode where the staff of Grace Brothers was cross-trained in toys, but it was such an uncommon occurrence that the characters were scandalized, and it provided much opportunity for laughing at the awkwardness that ensued.

The New jcp reminds me a lot of that.  Which means everything old is new again.  I wonder if this means that instead of everything moving farther and farther from where people live, if in another few decades, we'll see a return to downtowns.  I kind of hope so, and I hope it happens before all those glorious old buildings come tumbling down and are replaced by the metal box-buildings everybody's putting up these days.