JCPenney is Coming to Inland Center

The department store chain is scheduled to open Oct. 21 in the space formerly occupied by Gottschalks, space that has been empty for seven years. The store is expected to give the mall, and all of downtown San Bernardino, a much-needed lift. With the holiday season looming, the timing couldn’t be better.

Starting next month, a venerable retailer will give Inland Center mall in San Bernardino a shot in the arm.

JCPenney, one of the country’s largest and oldest department store chains, will open a two-level store at Inland Center Oct. 21 that will employ about 150 people, according to Inland Center officials.

The 119,000-square-foot store will occupy the former Gottschalks space, which has been vacant since that chain filed for bankruptcy and shut down in 2009, said Terri Relf, Inland Center’s senior marketing manager.

JCPenney will be Inland Center’s fourth anchor tenant, along with Forever 21, Macy’s and Sears. Besides opening in time for the holiday shopping season, the new JCPenney’s opening will coincide with Inland Center’s 50th anniversary celebration.

The new store will feature wider aisles, larger graphics and brighter lights than are found in a traditional JCPenney store. Most important, it will fill a large empty space that, for the past seven years, has generated little or no revenue for the mall next to Interstate 215 at 500 Inland Center Drive.

“It’s going to be a wonderful addition and it’s going to make it easier for us to be competitive in this market,” Relf said. “The whole store is going to have a bold look, inside and out, and people will be able to see it from the freeway. That should help a lot.”

JCPenney has deep roots in San Bernardino, having opened its first store there in 1916. Fifty seven years later, in 1973, that store moved to Central City Mall, which had just opened. Central City Mall later became Carousel Mall.

JCPenney left Carousel Mall in 2003, devastating that facility but reinforcing Inland Center as the dominant retail destination in San Bernardino. City officials now hope to tear down Carousel Mall and replace it with a retail-residential development, a project that is being developed, City Manager Mark Scott said.

“Filling that space is going to be big, not only for the mall but all of San Bernardino,”  Scott said of Inland Center and JCPenney. “It will give the tenants there a boost, and it will bring a lot more people into the downtown corridor.”

Like a lot of retailers, JCPenney struggled through the recession. It exited the catalog business in 2011, closing all 19 of its catalog outlet stores. Four years later, the chain announced it was closing 39 stores and laying off approximately 2,250 employees.

During that time, the 114-year-old chain has tried to remake itself in the era of social media and e-commerce.

In 2012, it implemented an “Every Day” pricing method that replaced traditional sales, and it began a “store within a store” program that it will employ in San Bernardino. Its Inland Center operation will include a Disney shop and a Sephora cosmetics and skincare location, according to a company statement.

Last month, the Plano,Texas-based chain announced that it would focus on special-size clothing and home goods, all while stepping up its efforts in e-commerce. The goal is three percent annual sales growth in comparable-store sales and net income between $450 and $500 million by 2019, according to company officials.

Its well-known brand name, combined with the rebranding the company is undertaking, make JCPenney a good fit for a traditional mall in need of an anchor tenant, said Stephanie Cegielski, spokeswoman for the International Council of Shopping Centers in New York.

“I’m not surprised that they would go into a mall like that,” Cegielski said. “They’ve been remaking themselves for the last five years or so, trying to reach a broader audience, and it’s starting to pay off. That kind of traditional mall is a good fit.”

JCPenney might be better suited to Inland Center and the blue collar clientele that shops there than a more upscale chain would be, said Judi Penman, president and chief executive of the San Bernardino Area Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s not Nordstrom, but it’s still a very good anchor tenant,” Penman said. “Their stores are clean and well-organized and I think people are comfortable shopping there.”

After a 13-year absence, San Bernardino’s business community is generally enthusiastic about JCPenney returning to the city, Penman said.

“The business people are excited when any new business comes to town,” Penman said. “I also think Inland Center has done well lately. They got Forever 21, which is a good anchor tenant with a lot to offer.”

Filling the former Gottschalks space was cruclal because, over time, too much empty space in a mall can drag down the entire facility, said Carol Plowman, senior vice president with Lee & Associates Ontario and a longtime real estate broker in the Inland region.

“Look at Montclair [Place], it’s falling apart,” Plowman said of the mall  – known as Montclair Plaza until it was renamed last fall – that has had to deal with an empty building last occupied by Robinsons-May, the department store chain that folded in 2005.

A long-planned renovation and expansion has been delayed several times, causing the mall that was once the only indoor shopping mall in San Bernardino County – it opened in 1968 – to slip even further.

“Inland Center had to do something,” Plowman said. “There are a lot of hardworking people in San Bernardino, and they need good retail. It will be good for downtown, and it should turn the entire mall around.”

Finding an anchor tenant in today’s hyper-competitive retail market can be so difficult that some malls end up finding other uses for the space. Those uses don’t necessarily generate a lot of revenue, at least not directly.

“We’ve seen rock climbing, [miniature] golf, all kinds of things,” Cegielski said. “The idea is to use the space to get people into the mall. Sometimes you have to get creative.”