funniest article ever-JCPenney WTF

J.C. PENNEY has broken free of its suburban parking area to invade Herald Square, and the most frequent question on New York’s collective lips seems to be: Why?

Why would this dowdy Middle American entity waddle into Midtown in its big old shorts and flip-flops without even bothering to update its ancient Helvetica Light logo, which for anyone who grew up with the company is encrusted with decades of tacky, boring, even traumatically parental, associations?

J. C. Penney has always trafficked in knockoffs that aren’t quite up to Canal Street’s illegal standards. It was never “get the look for less” so much as “get something vaguely shaped like the designer thing you want, but cut much more conservatively, made in all-petroleum materials, and with a too-similar wannabe logo that announces your inferiority to evil classmates as surely as if you were cursed to be followed around by a tuba section.”

J.C. PENNY

901 Avenue of the Americas (32nd Street); (212) 295-6120.

PENNIES The strategy, and a good one, is to mark nearly every item on every rack 30 to 60 percent off, and announce this with signs shouting “Doorbuster!” It all feels dizzyingly bargain-sational, prices so rock-bottom as to seem virtually free.

CRANNIES The new vertical layout, a breakaway from Penney’s tradition of inhabiting sprawling horizontal mall space, requires two floors of the Manhattan Mall. After you’ve mastered the escalator, it’s pretty much a big, sprawling Penney’s on two floors, crammed to the gills with a widely diverse clientele, the majority of whom seem very pleased.

DENNY’S No matter how many Grand Slam breakfasts you’ve knocked out of the park, Penney’s has a size for you. Ladies will find kicky little numbers that fit no matter how bountiful the good Lord made them; in the men’s Big & Tall section, even Voltron could find office casuals.

MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fashion/13CRITIC.html?_r=1&ref=style