Jill Soltau, a veteran retail leader most recently in charge of Joann fabric and craft stores, will be tasked with turning around JCPenney.
The company announced on Tuesday that Soltau will take over as its chief executive beginning on October 15. JCPenney has been leaderless since Marvin Ellison left in May to take the top job at Lowe’s.
Soltau, 51, will be the 25th woman currently leading a Fortune 500 company, according to Fortune magazine. She will become Penney’s fifth chief executive in the past decade.
She will make a base salary of $1.4 million, with a $6 million signing bonus and will be eligible for annual performance-based bonuses.
In a sign that Soltau has Wall Street’s approval to start, shares rose 10% in extended trading.
Soltau will face a daunting task: turning around JCPenney (JCP), a former retail heavyweight that has fallen more than 50% this year and slipped to close to $1.50 a share. Penney is currently without its chief financial officer. Jeffrey Davis resigned last week only 14 months after taking the job.
JCPenney’s decline comes at a moment when rival department stores Nordstrom (JWN), Kohl’s (KSS) and Macy’s (M) have demonstrated an ability to reinvent their businesses for the digital shopping era.
Soltau will have to make tough decisions about Penney’s store footprint. The company has 860 stores and hundreds of them are in struggling malls. JCPenney also has a glut of clothing piling up at its warehouses and stores.
Penney has been searching for a leader with merchandising experience to help it make better decisions about which brands to sell in stores.
“We wanted someone with rich apparel and merchandising experience and found Jill to be an ideal fit,” board director Paul Brown said in a news release.
Soltau took over at Joann in 2015. She has also held positions at Shopko, Sears, and Kohl’s.
Penney selecting Soltau signals the company wants to break from Ellison’s strategy.
Ellison was a former Home Depot executive and led Penney into the appliance business. But his tenure had mixed results: Washers and dryers were not major draws for customers and its clothing assortment suffered.
Penney believes its core shoppers are middle-aged women. Earlier this month, Penney introduced Artesia, a new women’s chic brand for less than $30.
The company closed all of its US stores in June as part of a bankruptcy liquidation. But the owners of the company’s remaining assets are looking into restarting the business, as well as the related Babies “R” Us brand, the company disclosed in a court filing this week.
Toys “R” Us had planned to auction off the rights to its name and the Babies “R” Us brand. Bidders had already made offers for them, according to the filing. But the company’s owners decided to cancel the auction.
The company said it is considering “a new, operating Toys ‘R’ Us and Babies ‘R’ Us branding company,” the filing said. The plan would “create new, domestic, retail operating businesses under the Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us names, as well as expand its international presence and further develop its private brands business.”
The details of when and how the brand would be brought back to life were not disclosed.
The fact that other bidders were interested in buying the name doesn’t necessarily mean that others were looking to bring it back to life. Companies often buy the brands of out-of-business competitors in bankruptcy court to make sure the brand can’t be used again by a new rival. Details of who was looking to buy the Toys “R” Us brand also was not disclosed in the bankruptcy filing.
Toys “R” Us filed for bankruptcy a year ago, with the plans to use the reorganization process to shed debt and remain in business. But after a disastrously bad Christmas shopping season the company announced in March that it would close its remaining 800 US stores and go out of business.
Employers and workers together are spending close to $20,000 for family health insurance coverage in 2018, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation report.
Although premiums have increased fairly modestly in recent years, the growth has far outpaced workers’ raises over time. The average family premium has increased 55% since 2008, twice as fast as workers’ wages and three times as fast as inflation, Kaiser’s Employer Health Benefits Survey found.
Companies pick up most of the tab, shelling out $14,100 a year, on average. Still, workers have to pay an average of $5,550, up 65% from a decade ago.
For single coverage, total premiums have reached $6,900, on average, up 47% from 2008. Workers contribute roughly $1,200 a year.
Deductibles also continue to burn a deeper hole in workers’ pockets. The average deductible now stands at $1,350, up 212% since 2008. That’s eight times faster than wage growth.
Also, more workers are subject to deductibles – some 85% in 2018, compared to 59% a decade ago. A quarter of all workers face deductibles of at least $2,000, up from 15% five years ago.
Employers have sought to limit premium increases by raising deductibles instead. But large deductibles are among Americans’ main complaints about their health coverage.
“As long as out-of-pocket costs for deductibles, drugs, surprise bills and more continue to outpace wage growth, people will be frustrated by their medical bills and see health costs as huge pocketbook and political issues,” said Drew Altman, Kaiser’s president.
While employers have been trying to rein in health care costs for years, the issue has come into the spotlight once again.
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced earlier this year that they were joining forces to give their combined 840,000 employees better health care choices and bring down costs, both for their workers and their companies.
A growing number of companies are also contracting directly with hospitals and providers to take care of their workers, according to a National Business Group on Health study released in August. General Motors and Henry Ford Health System in Detroit recently set up such a contract. The six-hospital system will provide access to more than 3,000 primary care and specialty doctors, as well as hospital, emergency room and pharmacy services, to nearly 24,000 salaried GM workers and their families.
Some employers are looking to limit their networks to certain high-quality providers, which allows them to lower costs. Some 11% of companies said they’ve implemented these performance-based networks, up from 3% in 2014, according to a survey released earlier this year by PwC, a consulting firm. Another 34% of firms said they were considering these networks.
More large companies are offering coverage for telemedicine visits with providers, such as through videoconferencing or remote monitoring. The share skyrocketed to 74% this year, up from 27% in 2015, according to the Kaiser study.
Employees, however, have yet to embrace the new technology. Only 0.51% of those in large employer plans had at least one telemedicine visit in 2016, the latest data available.
“Lots of companies are paying for telemedicine, but very few employees are using it,” said Matthew Rae, senior health policy analyst at Kaiser.
Barnes & Noble stock jumped more than 20% after the board said it would consider a sale of the troubled company.
The board said Wednesday it had appointed a special committee to review offers. One came from longtime Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio. He is the company’s largest shareholder, controlling close to 20%.
Barnes & Noble (BKS) also disclosed that a shareholder it could not identify had rapidly built up a stake in the company. To block a hostile takeover, Barnes & Noble’s board of directors approved what’s known as a poison pill.
The poison pill will kick in if the unidentified party accumulates 20% of the stock or more. At that point, shareholders will be allowed to buy Barnes & Noble’s stock at a 50% discount, diluting the value of the shares.
The announcement comes shortly after another investor disclosed a stake of close to 7%, and said he had held talks with Riggio about buying the company.
The board said Riggio would vote his shares in favor of any transaction recommended by the committee.
A potential sale is just the latest twist in the saga of Barnes & Noble, which is looking to replace its fifth chief executive in as many years.
The bookstore fired its most recent CEO, Demos Parneros, in early July, citing unspecified violations of company policy. Barnes & Noble later revealed that claims of sexual harassment and bullying led to Parneros’ termination.
In August, Parneros sued his former employer in federal court for defamation and for firing him without cause.
Barnes & Noble still has more 600 stores and 23,000 employees. Last quarter, same-store sales dropped 6.1% compared with a year ago.
Sales have fallen at Barnes & Noble during each of the past four years. New tactics, such as smaller store formats and a kitchen concept, have struggled to win back shoppers.
Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, said in September that most of the stores “feel tired, are too large and too cluttered, and do not offer the consumer any compelling reason to visit and buy.”
He believes Barnes & Noble will shutter more stores: “Barnes & Noble needs to slim down in order to survive.”
Barnes & Noble’s problems come as local and independent bookstores are resurgent.
The American Booksellers Association, a trade group, reported that the number of independent locations rose 6% last year to 2,470.
As part of a small clinical trial, Michel Roccati uses an implanted electrical stimulator to activate his spine, allowing him to move around without a wheelchair after his spinal cord injury.
By his count, Michel Roccati is on his third life, at least. In the first, he was a fit young man riding his motorcycle around Italy. A 2017 crash in the hills near Turin turned him into the second man, one with a severe spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Today, the third Michel Roccati works out in his home gym in Turin, gets around with a walker and climbs stairs to visit a friend in a second-story apartment. Today, he says, his life is “completely different than it was before.”
Roccati, age 31, is one of three men who received experimental spinal cord stimulators as part of a clinical trial. All three had completely paralyzed lower bodies. The results have been a stunning success, just as Roccati had hoped. “I fixed in my mind how I was at the end of the project,” he says. “I saw myself in a standing position and walking. At the end, it was exactly what I expected.”
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The technology that Roccati and others use , described in the February Nature Medicine , is an implanted array of electrodes that sits next to the spinal cord below the spot severed by the injury. Electrical signals from the device replace the missing signals from the brain, prompting muscles to move in ways that allow stepping, climbing stairs and even throwing down squats in the gym.
Today, Roccati spends time working at the consulting company he owns with his brother and sharing his ongoing physical accomplishments with researchers. “Every week we get a WhatsApp from Michel doing something new,” says study coauthor Robin Demesmaeker, a neural engineer at NeuroRestore, a research and treatment center in Lausanne, Switzerland.
These results and others prove that, with the right technology, people with severe spinal cord injury may be able to stand up and walk again. It’s a remarkable development.
But the really big news in this area goes far beyond walking. Many people with spinal cord injuries deal with problems that aren’t as obvious as paralysis. Low blood pressure, sexual dysfunction and trouble breathing or controlling hands, arms, bladder and bowels can all be huge challenges for people with paralysis as they navigate their daily lives. “These are the things that actually matter to people with spinal cord injuries,” says John Chernesky, who has a spinal cord injury. He works at the nonprofit Praxis Spinal Cord Institute in Vancouver, where he makes sure the priorities and voices of people living with spinal cord injuries are heard and addressed in research.
By figuring out the language of the spinal cord, researchers hope to learn how to precisely fill in the missing commands, bridging the gap left by the injury. The work may pave the way to treat many of these problems flagged by patients as important.
“The research field is changing … embracing all these other aspects,” says neuroscientist Kim Anderson Erisman of MetroHealth Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Already, early clinical trials are tackling the less obvious troubles that come with spinal cord injuries. Some of the same scientists that helped Roccati recently showed that similar spinal cord stimulation eased a man’s chronic low blood pressure. Other researchers are improving bladder and bowel function with stimulation. Still more work is focused on hand movements. The technology, and the understanding of how to use it to influence the nerves in the spinal cord, is moving quickly.
Not coincidentally, the way the research is being conducted is shifting, too, says Anderson Erisman, who has a spinal cord injury. “Scientists know the textbook things about spinal cord injuries,” she says. “But that’s not the same thing as living one day in the life with a spinal cord injury.” Involving people with such injuries in studies — as true partners and collaborators, not just subjects — is pushing research further and faster. Such collaboration, she says, “will only make your program stronger.”
These efforts are in the early stages. The stimulators are not available to the vast majority of people who might benefit from them. Only a handful of people have participated in these intense clinical trials so far. It’s unclear how well the results will hold up in larger trials with a greater diversity of volunteers. Also unclear is how attainable the technology will be for people who need it. For now, the research often requires large teams of experts, typically in big cities, with patients needing surgery and months of training the body to respond.
Still, the promise of spinal cord stimulation extends beyond spinal cord injuries. Stimulating nerves on the spinal cord could help people with symptoms from strokes, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and other disorders in which signals between the brain and body get garbled. Initially, “hardly anyone wanted to believe these [improvements] were happening,” says V. Reggie Edgerton, an integrative biologist at the University of Southern California’s Neurorestoration Center and the Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center in Downey, Calif. “But now, they’re happening so regularly that it’s undeniable.”
Not so long ago, a serious spinal cord injury was a death sentence. “Prior to World War II, the life expectancy of a person with a spinal cord injury was measured in days or weeks,” Chernesky says. If the injury didn’t kill a person directly, they’d often succumb to respiratory distress or blood poisoning from a bladder infection. “If you lived six months, that was impressive,” he says.
The spinal cord ferries signals between brain and body. Signals from the brain tell leg muscles to contract for a step, blood vessels to expand and the bladder to hold steady until a bathroom is within reach. Signals from the body to the brain carry sensations of moving, pain and touch. When the spinal cord is injured, as it is for an estimated 18,000 or so people each year in the United States alone, these signals are blocked.
In the United States, an estimated 18,000 people suffer a spinal cord injury each year. Vehicle crashes and falls are the most common causes, data collected from 2015 to 2021 show. Violence, particularly gunshot wounds, and sports accidents are also common reasons.
Researchers have long dreamed of repairing the damage by bridging the gap, perhaps with stem cells or growth factors that can beckon nerve cells to grow across the scar. The idea of using electricity to stimulate nerves below the site of the injury came, in part, from an accidental observation. In the mid-1970s, scientists were testing spinal cord stimulation as a treatment for severe and chronic pain. One participant happened to be a woman who was paralyzed from multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the body attacks its own nerves. With the device implanted on her spinal cord to ease pain, she was able to move again. That surprising discovery helped spark interest in spinal cord stimulation as a way to restore movement.
Earlier this year, Demesmaeker and his colleagues, including Grégoire Courtine of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, published the achievements of Roccati and two other men. All three men had been unable to move their lower limbs or feel any sensations there.
Most previous studies had relied on an electrode array designed and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat chronic pain. That device has electrodes that are implanted along the spinal cord, where their electrical jolts can ease long-term pain in the back and legs. But Roccati and the two other men received a specially designed device that was slightly longer and wider than that earlier device, able to cover more of the spinal cord’s nerve roots and provide more stimulation options.
Several weeks after surgery, the men visited the laboratory in Lausanne to start searching for the optimal stimulation settings. The timing, pattern and strength of the electrode signals were adjusted to allow Roccati to move. “We found a good sequence with the engineers that allowed me to stand up and see my body standing in the mirror in front of me,” Roccati says. “It was a very emotional moment. A standing ovation appeared from everyone in there.”
That first day, he took steps with the stimulation while being supported by a harness. That quick improvement is important, says biomedical engineer Ismael Seáñez of Washington University in St. Louis. “From day one, you can start training.” After months of intense practice (four to five sessions a week for one to three hours at a time), Roccati could walk without the harness, using only a walker.
The men in the trial have all been getting stronger, even when the stimulation is off. That suggests that there’s some sort of repair happening in the body, perhaps due to stronger neural pathways in the spinal cord. Just how the stimulation repairs the spinal cord is one of the big remaining mysteries.
“It’s exciting to see,” Seáñez says. “But it’s a first step in all of the different challenges faced by people with spinal cord injuries.”
Nerves in each spinal cord region carry signals to and from different body parts. That means the outcome of an injury depends on its location, with lower injuries affecting less of the body.
One important problem with paralysis is low blood pressure. When the spinal cord is damaged, the signals that keep blood vessels constricted and blood pressure normal can get lost. Low blood pressure can leave people mentally foggy, exhausted and prone to fainting, not ideal conditions for physical rehab work. Blood pressure can also rise or fall quickly, upping the risk for stroke and heart attack. That’s a huge problem, says Aaron Phillips, who studies the physiology of the nervous system at the University of Calgary in Canada. “Blood pressure is one of the vital signs of life,” he says.
So Phillips, Courtine and colleagues decided to implant a spinal cord stimulator to see if it would help a man who had low blood pressure due to a spinal cord injury. When the machine was on, his blood pressure rose toward normal levels , the researchers reported last year in Nature . When the stimulation was turned off, the man’s blood pressure dropped.
The scientists homed in on an area in the mid-back, just around thoracic segment 11 in the human spine. That spot had the biggest effect on the man’s blood pressure. “We now know that there’s a key area in the spinal cord that, when stimulated, controls neural circuits and the connected blood vessels to elevate and decrease blood pressure,” Phillips says.
The system the researchers developed operated like a thermostat with a set point. In experiments with the man on a tilting table, monitors sensed low blood pressure when the table mimicked standing up. That triggered the stimulators, which in turn told the blood vessels to bring the pressure back up to an acceptable level.
The results represent “a huge pinnacle of my career,” Phillips says. But many challenges remain. The system used in the study in Nature needs tweaking, and the long-term effects of such stimulation aren’t known. Phillips and his colleagues hope to answer these questions. With funding from DARPA, a U.S. Department of Defense agency that invests in breakthrough technologies, the team is working on a wireless blood pressure monitor, and an upcoming clinical trial aims to enroll about 20 people with spinal cord injuries that affect their blood pressure.
In 2004, Anderson Erisman and her colleagues asked people with spinal cord injuries to share their priorities for regaining function. For people with quadriplegia, who have impairments from the neck down, hand and arm function were most important. For people with paraplegia, who have use of their arms and upper body, sexual function was the highest priority. Both groups emphasized the desire for restored bladder and bowel function , Anderson Erisman and colleagues reported in the Journal of Neurotrauma . Walking was not at the top of either group’s wish list.
That’s no surprise to Chernesky, who uses a wheelchair. “The general population looks at people with spinal cord injuries rolling around in wheelchairs, and they say, ‘Oh, poor bugger. I bet he wishes he could walk,’ ” he says. “They have no idea that quite rapidly after an injury, walking becomes a lower priority.”
Chernesky himself recently participated in a clinical trial designed to externally stimulate the cervical spine, in his neck, to improve arm and hand movements. The device he tested sent signals to the spinal cord through the skin — a less invasive approach than surgery, but one that may sacrifice some specificity compared with implanted versions. Throughout that process, Chernesky noticed improvements in energy, sleep, strength, core stability and movement of both upper and lower limbs.
Other scientists are working on similar ways to externally stimulate the spinal cord to improve people’s autonomic nervous system. That system keeps your blood pressure steady, makes you sweat when it’s hot and tells you when you need to head to a bathroom.
In studies at the University of Southern California and elsewhere, Edgerton and colleagues have recently shown that external stimulation improved bowel function . He and others have also seen stimulators improve bladder function in people with spinal cord injuries and strokes. “We know some subjects can now feel when their bladder is full,” says Edgerton, who started a company called SpineX in 2019 to develop the technology further. That newfound sensation gives people enough time to get to the bathroom. “This doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen in every individual,” he cautions. “But it happens a lot.”
The next phase of research will be boring — in the best possible way. Large, standardized studies will need to address some mundane but crucial questions, such as who might benefit from stimulation, how much improvement can be made for certain symptoms and whether the therapy causes any extra trouble for some people. “This type of technology will go from a very exciting proof of concept to standard clinical care,” Seáñez predicts.
Over his nearly 30 years of living with a spinal cord injury, Chernesky has witnessed enough so-called scientific breakthroughs to be skeptical. He’s immune to hype. But he admits that he’s excited by this moment. “Because now we can reverse paralysis,” he says. That doesn’t mean people are going to suddenly be tap dancing like Fred Astaire or playing a Chopin concerto anytime soon, he’s quick to add. “But every little bit matters.”
Roccati, for one, no longer has to recruit friends to carry him in his wheelchair up stairs to socialize. He feels more energetic. He is working on his summer six-pack abs. He has transformed, again, into someone new. “Now, after the implant, I am another type of person,” he says, a more optimistic version of himself.
This technology is still a long way from helping everyone who might benefit. Still, these stimulators hold great promise. “I am quite hopeful, almost certain, that these devices are going to become available, and there will be a lot of people buying them,” Chernesky says. “When you have nothing, and you can get a little bit back — how good is that?”
Laura Sanders is the neuroscience writer. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Southern California.
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