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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Installing WiFi may not cause JC Penney to "hemorrhage" money but with 1,107 US stores if you assume a best case cost of say, $500 (and I think that's really optimistic) per store to make WiFi available to the public that's still $500k down the tubes for next to no benefit.

I'm sure the decision was based on this idea that they want people to shop on JCP.com while in the store, and if they can't get a cell signal, obviously they need to have WiFi. But still, the whole thing strikes me as poorly conceived. If I'm in the store, how about making my experience shopping at the store as good as possible and not tell me to pull out my phone to make it work?

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Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying WiFi was a brilliant move or anything: I'm saying that it's not JCP-exclusive, it's not particularly important, and there's nothing pointing to the conclusion that it was Ron's idea or decision. (My money's on the bet that it was in place before he took over.)

> If I'm in the store, how about making my experience shopping at the store as good as possible and not tell me to pull out my phone to make it work?

100% agreed.

32% year of years sales drop. One of the only differences the reporter could tell about the shopping experience offered free wifi that was slower than his cell service. An example of seemingly arbitrary and, in the eyes of shoppers, non helpful changes Johnson oversaw. What exactly was your critique?

schraeds your account has been dead for 11 months :(

It's very possible that JCP want to have their stores Internet enabled for other reasons, and thus the ability to offer Internet to customers is just a side benefit of that at (possibly) no additional cost.

> If I'm in the store, how about making my experience shopping at the store as good as possible and not tell me to pull out my phone to make it work?

Not everyone in the store is there to shop. It could be a competitive advantage to have these non-shoppers urge the shoppers they go with to go to JCP instead of some other place.

Also, it is possible that giving Internet access to shoppers is easier/cheaper than making the experience in the stores as good as possible. If I want to comparison shop, for example, I wouldn't trust information given to me by the store I'm in, I would pull out my phone.

The premise is that the stores already have wi-fi for store operations, e.g. those inventory control computers with built-in bar scanners, price-check kiosks, and maybe even something like Nordstrom Rack's "you can check out anywhere in the store by going to our team in green" mobile checkout.

Then you slap guest wifi on top of this on a separate SSID, and throttle its bandwidth use to something appropriate, it's dirt cheap, and will attract people to the aforementioned coffee-shop-style lounges.

THEN if you want to get FANCY you use one of the new-fangled wifi analytics tools like Ekahau or Nearbuy to track frequency of repeat visitors and generate heatmaps and whatnot:

* http://www.nearbuysystems.com/products/in-store-analytics.ht...

* http://www.ekahau.com/solutions/retail.html

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