Right to Opine

Reuters reports that JCPenney stock dropped 8.5% today, which comes on the heels of an 18.9% drop in sales.

In February, J.C. Penney introduced a new pricing scheme that largely did away with coupons and hundreds of sales events shoppers had come to expect, in favor of everyday prices. It launched an advertising campaign featuring comedian Ellen DeGeneres to coincide with the new approach.

The ads were hailed as hip, but critics faulted them for failing to explain the new pricing approach clearly enough. The company last month acknowledged that the ads had resulted in the loss of some longtime Penney shoppers who had looked for markdowns.

Somehow overlooked is the fact that coinciding with the pricing change was a new direction for the company—aggressively pushing a pro-homosexual agenda with DeGeneres at the forefront and conspicuously gay male models in the latest catalogs and ads. Who makes up the bulk of JCP’s customers? Families. Natural families, as in mom and dad. Guess who tend to have traditional, Biblical, conservative moral values and are increasingly tired of having the LGBT agenda shoved in their faces? Natural families, as in mom and dad.

Coincidence? Time will tell.