April Bookstore Sales Tumbled 65.3% (publishersweekly.com)

J. C. Penney Company, Inc. announced that it has received authorization from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, in Corpus Christi, Texas (the “Court”) to access its debtor-in-possession (“DIP”) financing, which includes $450 million of new money from its existing First Lien lenders. The Company had previously received approval to access and use its approximately $500 million in cash collateral. Under the terms of the DIP agreement, JCPenney has access to up to $225 million immediately, and will have access to an additional $225 million as needed after July 15, 2020, subject to certain conditions. In addition, the Company’s Ad Hoc Crossholder Group of lenders has agreed to participate in the rollup portion of the DIP in the amount of $53 million. Jill Soltau, chief executive officer of JCPenney, said, “We are pleased to have received Court approval to access $450 million in new money, $225 million of which will be drawn immediately. This is a positive step forward that will help us execute our Plan for Renewal and store optimization strategy, continue working seamlessly with our vendor partners, fund our ongoing business operations, and continue our focus on further developing the Company’s go-forward business plan to successfully restructure JCPenney. In recent weeks, we have safely welcomed back valued customers to nearly 500 JCPenney stores, and we look forward to opening additional stores while following guidance from local and state orders. This progress would not be possible without the hard work and dedication of our associates, and we remain confident we will emerge from both Chapter 11 and this pandemic as a stronger retailer.”

"As our CFO Joe Corbett will explain later in our financial presentation, the Postal Service finished the fiscal year 2023 with a $6.5 billion dollar net loss. When looking back to our DFA projections published in March of 2021, we forecasted that we would break even this year. Our efforts to grow revenue and reduce labor and transportation costs were simply not enough to overcome our costs to stabilize our organization, the historical inflationary environment we encountered, and our inability to obtain the CSRS reform we sought, none of which were accounted for in our forecasts. While we are not happy with this result, we cannot lose sight of the downward trajectory the Postal Service faced in the fall of 2020 after years of neglect and willful indifference by its stakeholders and custodians prior, and of the substantial progress we have made in correcting our condition and our trajectory."

It seemed impossible that the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House the day before Thanksgiving could be overshadowed by a bigger industry event, but that is what happened when book publishing’s long-running trade show and convention, most recently known as BookExpo, was canceled. As the buzz about the end of BookExpo has cooled down, industry members continue to digest the news of PRH’s pending purchase of S&S, the nation’s largest and third-largest trade book publishers, respectively. When the acquisition was announced, the Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, and the Association of American Literary Agents (formerly the AAR) all issued statements that were critical of the deal. While each organization had a particular take, all shared one thing in common: they were concerned about the increasing consolidation within trade publishing. The Authors Guild, which called the 2012 Random House–Penguin merger “unsettling,” took a tougher stance in PRH’s S&S purchase, saying that, for authors, the reduction of the Big Five to Big Four would leave “fewer competing bidders for their manuscripts, which would inevitably drive down advances offered.”