Five hundred and ninety.

That's the number of promotions J.C. Penney held last year.

No wonder we're addicted to sales and coupons. Nobody wants to pay full price when you know there's a huge markup and a sale will be coming soon — and in J.C. Penney's case, a couple of times a day.

But Ron Johnson, the new chief executive of J.C. Penney, wants to change all that. Johnson was a rock star at Apple, where he helped engineer the company's wildly popular retail stores.

So the retail world has been eagerly anticipating Johnson's vision of how he would transform not only J.C. Penney — but also to see whether his ideas could help resurrect the American department store whose obituary naysayers have been writing for decades.

This week, he unveiled his plan. He started off by being so bold as to say that the No. 1 opportunity in retail today is — no, not the Internet — but the department store. OK. Tell us more.

Starting Feb. 1, Johnson is instituting a new pricing strategy of low, everyday prices instead of higher prices followed by sales, promotions and clearances. He's not completely getting rid of promotions, but there will be drastically fewer. More like one a month.

So will this work?

Martin Sneider, adjunct professor of retailing at Washington University, is circumspect. It's an admirable goal, he said. But other attempts to have more pricing integrity at department stores — including at Sears in the late 1980s and Dillard's in the 1990s — have failed, he said.

"The primary reason they failed is because customers don't believe it," he said. "They've been educated and conditioned to expect sales. ... By conditioning the customer over decades, they've created a monster."

This would work better at Apple, where you have a cult product where customers are almost price agnostic, Sneider said. But J.C. Penney's customer is very price sensitive.

"He's had a very successful run at Apple, so he may be able to do it," Sneider said. "But I would say the odds are stacked against him."

In addition to a new pricing strategy, Johnson also announced a new J.C. Penney's store design with each store to be divided into 100 small boutiques. These changes will be rolled out over the next few years.

By his side during this overhaul will be Michael Kramer, the former chief executive of Town and Country-based Kellwood Co., who recently left St. Louis to become chief operating officer of J.C. Penney.

Johnson and Kramer were buddies at Apple. And now they once again have everyone's eyes on them.

PROPOSED BOOKSTORE REGROUPS

Last week, I wrote about the plan to put an author-run bookstore in Chesterfield Mall. Well, plans have changed and things are now up the air.

The proposed bookstore was to be a cooperative of sorts, run by many self-published authors who would hold book signings and sell their books in the store.

It was to open in the "I Don't Want to Kiss a Llama" store in Chesterfield Mall.

But Suzi Tozer, the woman leading the charge, said they are now looking for another spot — perhaps elsewhere in the mall — to house the bookstore since the arrangement with Byron von Rosenberg, who runs the "I Don't Want to Kiss a Llama" store, fell apart.

Rosenberg said he was interested in Tozer's idea when she brought it to him. But there appears to have been some miscommunication and disagreement about how the logistics of the store and the lease would work.

"We realized that even though we shared a dream with Suzi, we were not going to be able to work it out," he said.

Rosenberg just renewed the lease on his store for one year. And he told me in an email that he would be glad to take local authors' books on consignment and to have them hold book signings at the store.

So stay tuned to see how it all pans out.

TWO SHUTTERED MALL STORES

And finally, since it's January — a time when many stores call it quits as leases expire — I thought I'd mention a couple of stores that have closed at area malls.

Justice, the girls clothing store, has left the St. Louis Galleria. But the retailer's other stores at local malls are apparently not closing — just this one.

And the Abercrombie & Fitch store at Chesterfield Mall shuttered this week, too. Its lease was up.

Abercrombie had said last year that it would close 55 to 60 of its stores by the end of its fiscal year in January. So this appears to have been one of them.