Ron Johnson hasn’t killed JCPenney, after all.
That was the hope on Wall Street yesterday after the troubled retailer said business has improved lately as it scrambles to recover from a botched turnaround bid by the ousted CEO.
The Plano, Texas-based department store said back-to-school sales have been “encouraging” and that it expects to end the year with $1.5 billion on its balance sheet.
The positive tone — which follows a bruising battle between Penney’s board and activist Bill Ackman over control of the company earlier this month — sent the shares up 6 percent to close at $14.01.
Last week, sources told The Post that sales at stores open at least a year — or same-store sales — a closely watched retail metric, had turned positive in August.
This past weekend, “business was bumpier,” according to one insider. It’s not clear whether August as a whole is still tracking for a same-store sales increase.
Nevertheless, “whether it’s slightly up or down or flat now, it’s not way down like it was,” the source said.
On a conference call with analysts, CEO Mike Ullman was upbeat.
“The response to our back-to-school marketing messaging which we launched late in the period has been promising,” he said.
The interim CEO couldn’t resist taking a few thinly veiled swipes at Johnson, referring to “errors of the past” that had resulted in “lost faith” among shoppers.
Ullman also picked at The Post’s exclusive report last month that commercial lender CIT had stopped approving financing for deliveries from smaller vendors, even though the report specifically noted that key vendors continued to ship to Penney stores.
“Despite what may have been erroneously reported last month, our shipments have been and will continue to flow,” Ullman said. “We’re very grateful for the support of our key vendors.”
For the quarter ended July 31, Penney posted a loss of $568 million, as same-store sales dropped 11.9 percent.