While JCPenney honcho Ron Johnson (above) has been laying off thousands of workers and shares have tanked, the belt-tightening doesn’t seem to extend to the executive suite. (AP)
For the new executive talent at JCPenney, private jets and five-star hotels aren’t always enough.
CEO Ron Johnson’s top managers have been carving out sleek offices at company headquarters with fancy furniture and window views, sources told The Post — and your chances of getting one are a lot better if you used to work at Apple.
Many senior execs at Penney’s home office in Plano, Texas, still toil in cramped cubicles despite decades of service. But Johnson has discovered enough space for himself to construct a walk-in closet with a massive $1,000-plus mirror, according to one source close to the retailer.
“It’s filled with JCPenney clothes, so [Johnson] can change into them when he goes on TV,” the source said of the closet. “[Johnson] doesn’t wear JCPenney stuff unless he has to.”
Sometimes the renovations for the top brass rankled workers — sometimes they just made them chuckle.
For instance, a finance exec who was given a cubicle last year later demanded that an office be built for him on a windowed wall at a price in excess of $8,000 — despite the fact that the space had no access to heat or air conditioning.
“He was freezing all winter, and he’s going to be sweating all summer,” one former employee said. “That’s how bad he wanted that office with the view.”
Perhaps Johnson and his management team now realize their renovation follies.
In an emailed response yesterday, Penney told The Post it is now looking to make work spaces less hierarchical. No new furniture is being bought and no new offices are being built, Penney said.
“The leadership team, including Ron, is actually in the process of repurposing what used to be the executive floor into meeting space that can be used by the entire home office,” the company said. “The leadership team will then move to open desks among the cubicles in order to work more closely with their teams.”
As first reported by The Post, Johnson and other top execs commute on jets — on the company’s dime — back to their homes in New York, Boston and California for long weekends, even as a botched turnaround bid has created a cash crisis.
The jet-set commutation Penney pack may number as many as nine bigwigs.
Johnson and his cronies have spent most weeknights at the Dallas Ritz-Carlton. On at least one evening last year, a top exec ran up a $1,200 tab at the swanky hotel’s bar, according to a source.
“It’s not great for morale when, at the same time, they’re firing thousands of people in the name of cost cutting,” one former exec told The Post.
This week, Penney revealed in a securities filing that it ended the past fiscal year on Feb. 2 with 116,000 employees — 43,000 fewer than a year earlier — as it scrambled to slash expenses amid a 25 percent sales drop.
Sales at the once-proud department store chain have fallen to their lowest level since 1987.
Still, new hires at headquarters, many of them Apple alumni, have staked out cushy workspaces for themselves, ordering posh furnishings and insisting the company replace their PCs with Apple computers and iPads — despite company networks that remain PC-based.
“You can’t coordinate people’s calendars because there are glitches in the Apple software,” one insider said. “The IT people don’t know how to work on them — I think that’s part of the reason they fired a lot of the IT department.”
Chief Creative Officer Michael Fisher — an Apple alum known for his neon-colored sneakers, puffer jackets and bizarre orders that staff always wear at least one article of camouflage clothing per day — decked out his office with pricey rugs and a desk worth more than $10,000, sources said.
“The place looks like a brothel,” one former exec said of Fisher’s office style, noting that the suite was fragrant with live orchids and candles despite building codes.
“It’s not so much how much money Fisher spends, but the fact that he spends so much time thinking about how the office should look,” another former employee said.
Fisher, the source added, has ordered similar office upgrades for several of his favorite employees.
In one particularly perplexing move, Fisher, in January, demanded that the plastic name tag on the wall outside his office be replaced by sleek lettering etched on glass. When the plastic tag was peeled off, it left glue on the wall.
Fisher’s solution: Remove the wallpaper and repaint the entire wall, which spans eight executive offices.
“He kept saying, ‘Can’t we do something different with the wall?’ ” a source said, noting that Fisher had long been vocal about his distaste for the building’s peach-colored wallpaper.
“He spent two weeks figuring out what to do about the wall,” a source sniffed.
The head-scratching renovations come as Penney shares fell 4 percent yesterday, to $15.53. They are off more than 21 percent this year.
Over the same period, shares of rivals Macy’s and Kohl’s are both up more than 8 percent and the S&P 500 has gained 8.4 percent.