J.C. Penney

After more than 50 years in business, JC's 5 Star Outlet/J.C. Penney Outlet will be closing all 15 outlet stores in 14 states. "Going Out of Business" or "Total Inventory Blowout" sales will start Wednesday in each outlet store, offering consumers $70 million worth of name brand and private label products at significant discounts from the already low outlet prices of 25 percent to 75 percent off comparative retail. The outlet stores trace their roots to J.C. Penney's 1962 purchase of a Milwaukee mail order company, the General Merchandise Company.

J.C. Penney is going against the retail trend and dumping its newly installed in-store Wi-Fi. The department-store company, which invested about $12 million installing the free, publicly accessible Wi-Fi last year, will save about $7 million a year by halting the service, sources familiar with the situation told BuzzFeed on the condition of anonymity. While mobile checkout devices will still use wireless internet, it won't work for the public — or for store employees’ personal phones, sources say, leading to some unhappy grumbling on Twitter.

An upscale coffee-press maker has sued J.C. Penney for breach of contract. Bodum Group says the retailer didn't deliver on its promise to build and roll out modern, chic shops within its stores to showcase Bodum's wares. Bodum and Penney had reached a deal in November 2012 to have Penney prominently feature Bodum houseware products and Ordning & Reda office and stationery products as part of its now abandoned plan to transform its department stores into collections of "shop in shops."

Martha Stewart's stormy affair with J.C. Penney is ending … and she's the one getting dumped. Stewart's line of home goods at Penney, which sparked an epic courtroom battle with Macy's, is getting scrapped for good by Penney CEO Mike Ullman, The Post has learned. That's despite the fact that a New York judge still hasn't ruled on the three-way legal scuffle — sparked by Macy's pre-existing licensing deal with Stewart — whose year-and-a-half saga is expected to conclude in the coming days.

The hedge fund manager William A. Ackman moved on Monday to sell his roughly 18 percent stake in J. C. Penney, nearly two weeks after he resigned from the board amid an unusual public battle with his fellow directors. Penney filed a prospectus with regulators giving notice that Mr. Ackman's firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, planned to sell its 39.1 million shares. The retailer, which will not receive any proceeds from the sale, didn't list an expected selling price.

As J.C. Penney attempts to recover from a period in which it alienated customers, enraged employees and suffered abysmal sales, its new chief executive, Mike Ullman, is aggressively purging corporate ranks and halting initiatives launched under the previous regime. In essence, Ullman appears intent on removing any trace of his predecessor, the former Apple executive Ron Johnson, whose disastrous 17-month tenure as J.C. Penney CEO ended with his ouster in April.

Liz Dunn, consumer sector senior analyst at Macquarie Capital, looks at the three things J.C. Penney needs to do in the next six months.

A J.C. Penney back-to-school ad that implies kids will be friendless unless they wear the right clothing is promoting bullying, charged a flurry of critics on social media this week. "Your ad about cool kids wearing J.C. Penney clothes, showing a child sitting alone at lunch is despicable," fired off one Facebook user. Another added, "How clueless are you? What a horrible bully-promoting commercial." Twitter users have called it "tone deaf" and "more self-immolation" for the company. The ad was posted online by the retailer in late July and aired as part of a TV campaign earlier this summer. 

Hedge fund manager William Ackman has resigned from the board of J.C. Penney, bringing an end to an unusually public rift among directors that had threatened the struggling company's turnaround efforts. Ackman resigned Monday, J.C. Penney said in a statement Tuesday. The board is bringing aboard former Federated Department Stores Inc. — now Macy's — executive Ronald Tysoe and said it will name another new director in the future. The board also declared its "overwhelming support" for Chairman Thomas Engibous and Chief Executive Myron "Mike" Ullman, both of whom Mr. Ackman had argued should be replaced.

Struggling retailer J.C. Penney is on the hunt for a new CEO. CNBC's Courtney Reagan and Scott Wapner discuss.