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JCPenney keeps shrinking, closing its Pleasanton, California anchor store and five more locations in 2026. September 23, 2026 JCPenney has permanently shut its longtime anchor store at a major East Bay mall in California, part of a broader 2026 retreat that has trimmed the once-dominant chain to roughly 640 locations nationwide. The retailer closed its store at Stoneridge Shopping Center in Pleasanton, California, in February, ending a presence that dated to the 1980s. A JCPenney spokesperson told the Pleasanton Weekly that the company could not reach terms on its lease and had no alternative site in the market. The Pleasanton location is not an isolated loss. JCPenney has also closed stores at Seminole Towne Center in Sanford, Florida; Ford City Mall in Chicago; Rivergate Mall in Goodlettsville, Tennessee; Springfield Town Center in Springfield, Virginia; and Ross Park Mall outside Pittsburgh. Each closure follows the same pattern: expiring legacy mall leases and shifting foot traffic forced the company to walk away from locations it once anchored for decades. From 2,000 stores to 640, and still falling. At its peak in the 1970s, JCPenney operated more than 2,000 stores across the country. By the time the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020, that number had already dropped to 846, according to SEC filings. Simon Property Group acquired the chain that same year in a deal valued at $1.75 billion. Six years later, the footprint has contracted again, to roughly 640 locations. That means JCPenney has shed more than 200 stores since emerging from bankruptcy, a pace of closure that shows no sign of slowing. The financial picture matches the shrinking map. Net sales fell more than 8 percent year-over-year to $1.3 billion during the second quarter of 2026, Retail Dive reported. Neil Saunders, managing director at the market research firm GlobalData, put the decline in blunt terms. "The market, even just for department stores, grew during the quarter, so JCP's sales dip represents a serious loss of market share." That distinction matters. JCPenney is not simply caught in a sector-wide downturn. The broader department store market grew during the same period, which means the chain lost ground to competitors while the category itself expanded. Lease failures drove the Pleasanton and Pittsburgh closures. In its statement on the Pleasanton closure, JCPenney framed the decision as a lease negotiation that fell apart rather than a strategic pullback: "Regretfully, we are unable to continue our current lease terms for this store location and have been unable to find another suitable location in the market. We are grateful to our dedicated associates and the loyal customers who have shopped at our Pleasanton, CA, location through the years." The company used nearly identical language to explain the loss of its nearly 40-year-old Ross Park Mall store outside Pittsburgh, where lease talks also broke down. When a retailer cannot afford the rent at a suburban mall it has occupied for four decades, the math speaks for itself. Pleasanton sits in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, an area where commercial rents remain steep and foot traffic has shifted toward online shopping and newer retail formats. For a chain bleeding market share, holding a high-cost lease in a pricey California market was evidently unsustainable. A national pattern, not a regional blip. The six closures announced in 2026 span the country, California, Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. No single region accounts for the contraction. The common thread is aging mall locations with legacy leases that JCPenney can no longer justify. In Goodlettsville, Tennessee, the Rivergate Mall location joined the list. That closure fits a pattern seen at other JCPenney mall departures, where replacement tenants sometimes move quickly to fill the vacant anchor space with different concepts entirely. JCPenney is far from the only retailer retreating from physical storefronts. Across the industry, retail closures have surged to record levels, driven by the same combination of high rents, online competition, and changing consumer habits. But JCPenney's losses stand out because they come after a bankruptcy restructuring and a billion-dollar acquisition that were supposed to stabilize the brand. Simon Property Group, one of the largest mall operators in the country, bought JCPenney presumably to protect its own properties from losing anchor tenants. Yet the company Simon acquired continues to shed locations, including, in some cases, stores inside Simon-owned malls. The strategy of keeping a struggling department store alive to preserve mall traffic has not reversed the underlying decline. Long-tenured stores are the ones disappearing. What stands out about this round of closures is the age of the locations being cut. The Pleasanton store opened in the 1980s. The Ross Park Mall store operated for nearly 40 years. These are not experimental pop-ups or recent expansions that failed to find an audience. They are legacy anchor positions, the kind of stores that once defined a mall's identity and drew shoppers through the doors. Losing stores with that kind of tenure signals something deeper than a bad quarter. It suggests the economics of the traditional department-store-as-mall-anchor model no longer work for JCPenney at a growing number of locations. The chain has also closed long-standing stores in Fort Worth and departed malls in Maryland that themselves shut down entirely, a reminder that the decline cuts both ways, with weakening retailers and weakening malls dragging each other down. JCPenney has pointed to a new online marketplace as part of its path forward. But the company has offered few specifics about what that marketplace involves or how it will offset the revenue lost from hundreds of closed stores. Meanwhile, the closures keep coming. A company that once blanketed the country with more than 2,000 stores now operates fewer than a third of that number, and every quarter seems to bring another round of goodbye sales. At some point, restructuring stops being a turnaround and starts being a slow liquidation with better branding.

Home among best performers as JCPenney sales decline. Jennifer Marks// Editor in Chief//September 23, 2026 Summary: * JCPenney net sales fell 8% to $1.3 billion * Home was led by furniture, which increased 41% year-over-year * JCPenney launched third-party marketplace online Plano, Texas - JCPenney's net sales fell 8% to $1.3 billion during the second quarter, largely pulled down by problems in apparel. Active, home, jewelry, beauty and salon were strongest categories during the quarter ended Aug. 1. Home performance was led by furniture, which increased 41% compared to the year-ago period. Gross margin as a percent of sales bumped up to 39.2% from 38.7%. in last year's Q2. Margin growth included the impacts of higher product costs, pricing actions taken related to those cost increases, changes in category mix and increased promotional activity. "By the end of the second quarter and continuing into the start of the third quarter, significant trend improvements were seen in store traffic and e-commerce conversion, along with double-digit growth in both new loyalty program and credit card enrollments," the company reported in its Penney Intermediate Holdings LLC Financial filing. During the quarter, the company also launched JCPenney Marketplace, which incorporates third-party managed products as an enhancement to the JCPenney merchandise offered on its website. "Initial results have outperformed expectations, and the company is confident that JC Penney Marketplace will continue to provide incremental long-term growth to its ecommerce website. As these improvements began late in the quarter, second quarter results primarily reflect the pressured consumer environment as well as the impact of lower inventory in key traffic-driving categories," the company said. Net income tumbled 51% to $52 million. At the end of the period, JCPenney had $800 million in liquidity available for future working capital needs and had nothing outstanding under its shared line of credit. For the first half of the fiscal year, net sales declined 6.5% to $2.55 billion. The company reported a net loss of $11 million compared to net income of $41 million in the year-ago quarter. For the back half of the year, JCPenney is focused on its value pricing programs such as Price Lock, Daly Deals and Really Big Deals. The retailer is also rebuilding inventory depth in key private label apparel brands and making improvements to digital availability and fulfillment. "The company plans to implement all these actions throughout the fall and holiday seasons, supported by holiday presentations centered on clear value and family moments, while continuing to monitor the consumer environment and customer response and make strategic adjustments as necessary," it said in its filing.

Home gave JCPenney a lift during challenging Q2. Sales of home-related products gave JCPenney a boost during the second quarter, while its overall sales and income slipped year over year, according to Copper Property CTL Pass Through Trust. Copper Property is an entity created when JCPenney emerged from bankruptcy in 2021 as a private company to sell off properties its new owners, Simon Property Group and Brookfield Asset Management, did not retain. JCPenney later merged with the SPARC Group to form Catalyst Brands. Copper continues to report on Penney Intermediate Holdings for its original function and related master leases. Total JCPenney sales in its second quarter were $1.3 billion versus $1.42 billion in the year-before quarter, while total revenues were $1.36 million versus $1.48 million, Copper Property reported in a statement. Operating income was $57 million versus $126 million in the year-prior period. Net income was $54 million versus $110 million in the year-previous quarter. The Copper Property statement indicated home, beauty, jewelry, active and salon led in terms of product category performance during the second quarter. In the period, JCPenney remained focused on serving working families, refined customer engagement initiatives with clearer value communications, targeted customer activations and improved inventory allocations, and the quarter saw significant and ongoing store traffic and e-commerce conversion trend improvements, according to Cooper Property. As it approaches the holidays, JCPenney will focus on competitive key-items pricing, clear promotional communications and sharper inventory allocations to boost its prospects in the selling season, the trust reported.