In an effort to stem a tide of falling revenue (can you stem something that's falling? I'll think about that later), JC Penny, the middle-market, middle-class purveyor of shirts n' shorts, hired away Ron Johnson from Apple. Mr. Johnson was credited, at least, with the Apple Store idea and probably other things I don't know about, since I pay as little attention to video game manufacturers as I do to major league -- well, anything. Didn't work out for 'em, dollar wise.
Since a) I know nothing about big retail marketing and b) I haven't been in a Penny's for decades, I have to take some of this on faith, but apparently, Johnson's big idea was to do away with sales and coupons. To his astonishment, the customers weren't amused. Apparently, his response was "Our customer just doesn't understand our pricing."
This reminds me of a meeting I was in, years back, in which a QA Engineer characterized some aspect of a user interface as "unintuitive." The lead developer said, "Well, it'll be intuitive once we explain it."
In fairness, I did like the Penny's "screaming" commercial, although many didn't, for some reason.
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