Ron Johnson, the former Apple superstar is now the former JCP CEO as he was released yesterday. Johnson tried to turn the mundane and declining JCP into “America’s favorite retailer” with hip mini-stores throughout the JCP space. Unfortunately, consumers didn’t buy it. Johnson chased away the former customers and never attracted a new set of customers. If you weren’t in the investment industry, you would have no idea about the new JCP.

To just about every American consumer, based on years of conditioning from walking around malls since the 1980s, JC Penny was still JC Penny, and consumers were not going to just suddenly start shopping there. I actually checked out a JCP in February, and it looked the same to me.

Johnson also made a huge error by rolling out the change across the entire chain at once, instead of testing the concept in a smaller sample of stores. You just don’t change an entire concept overnight without testing it.

Chuck Mills, the former football coach, once said, “I give the same halftime speech over and over. It works best when my players are better than the other coach’s players.” And therein lied the big problem. Many thought that the magic Johnson had at Apple would translate to JCP. But JC Penny was no Apple.