Kohl's lost its core customer. Not misplaced. Lost. Like car keys but the car is a nationwide retail chain and the keys are women aged 45 to 65 who stopped caring about Kohl's Cash sometime during the Obama administration.
The stock cratered because the company forgot what it sold and who bought it. Happens all the time. You wake up one morning and your entire business model is a Spirit Halloween waiting for a location.
Executives now claim they have a turnaround plan. They're trying to become relevant again. Relevant. The word you use when admitting you're currently the retail equivalent of a fax machine.
The plan involves figuring out what customers want. Revolutionary stuff. Bleeding edge strategy. Next they'll discover that charging money for products generates revenue.
Here's what happened: Kohl's spent years optimizing itself into irrelevance while Amazon taught America that driving to a fluorescent-lit box store to buy towels is for people who enjoy suffering. The core customer didn't leave. She evolved. Kohl's stayed exactly where it was, which in retail is the same as dying but with quarterly earnings calls.
Retail traders saw the stock drop and immediately started buying the dip. Because if there's one thing that screams investment opportunity, it's a department store that lost the only people who shopped there.
The turnaround strategy is simple: become the store people want to visit instead of the store people remember their mothers visiting. Kohl's is workshopping relevance like it's an ad campaign instead of the thing you either have or fake until bankruptcy.
They'll probably add self-checkout kiosks and call it innovation.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
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