What I have seen is situations where things were made horribly complicated to get around protections for which there was no need, and to try to guard the consistency of data structures that were horribly over-complicated and un-normalized.

Have you ever: Been disappointed, surprised or hurt by a library etc. that had a bug that could have been fixed with inheritance and few lines of code, but due to private / final methods and classes were forced to wait for an official patch that might never come? I have. Wanted to use a library for a slightly different use case than was imagined by the authors but were unable to do so because of private / final methods and classes? I have.

So, where did J.C. Penney go wrong? Well, while we admire their attempt to change, they attempted to destroy over a century’s worth of price conditioning consumers have been through with department stores and pricing in general. They weren’t completely off base, as consumers with more and more access to information (comparison shopping engines, consumer reports, etc.), are beginning to realize that the value of products is determined much differently than a sticker would suggest. Yet, assuming that most soccer moms (and dads) wouldn’t fall prey to the colorful print ads tucked within the comics section in the Sunday paper, overlooks how much the majority of consumers value “winning” the retail game. Simply, deflating the perceived value causes customers to value the actual product less.