"To be everywhere is to be nowhere." - Seneca
THE SIGNAL
In a June 27, 2026 interview, Kohl’s CEO Michael Bender told CNBC directly, “We stopped listening to the customer.”
The admission lands after a brutal stretch. Kohl’s stock hit an all time high near 82 dollars a share in late 2018, on revenue of 20.23 billion dollars for the fiscal year ended February 2019.
Five years later the stock had lost nearly 70 percent of its value, and Wall Street had stopped extending the retailer the benefit of the doubt.
Its most recent quarter told a different story, revenue of 3 billion dollars, its best comparable sales growth in four years, and a 20 percent stock spike on the report. Even so, TD Cowen analysts still rated the stock a hold, calling Kohl’s a “show me story.” Bender called the quarter “knocking on the door of growth,” not arrival.
THE FAILURE POINT
Bender named the exact decision himself. Kohl’s eliminated categories including petites and jewelry, calling them, in his words, “not substitutable.” A customer who cannot find petites at Kohl’s does not buy something else at Kohl’s. She leaves and buys petites somewhere else. That is the moment the strategy stopped being a strategy and started being a slow transfer of loyal customers to competitors, one deprioritized category at a time.
SIGNAL WITHIN THE SIGNAL
Competitive pressure on Kohl’s never let up. Off price rivals undercut on value. Amazon undercut on convenience. Athletic retailers undercut on category authority. What should have absorbed that pressure was a stable internal identity, but Kohl’s leadership churned instead, and each new regime answered the pressure with a new theory. Off price one year, athleisure the next, private label after that. External pressure stayed constant. Internal regulation reset with every executive change. Norman’s Law does not require malice to produce instability. It only requires the gap to sit open long enough, and Kohl’s left it open for the better part of a decade.
Worth checking where your own team sits on that same gap before assuming it's someone else's problem.
Score your gap →
BEHAVIOR UNDER PRESSURE
Under pressure, Kohl’s leadership narrowed to whichever competitor looked most urgent that quarter.
Losing ground to T.J. Maxx meant leaning into off price.
Losing ground to athletic retailers meant chasing athleisure.
Losing ground to Amazon meant doubling down on private label. Each pivot was a reasonable response to a single quarter’s pressure and an unreasonable response to the customer’s need for a store that stayed the same store.
Analyst Sonia Lapinsky called it “a constant kind of shift of what the customer can expect when they walk into the store.” That shift was the tempo. It got mistaken for judgment for the better part of ten years, and rapid executive turnover made sure no one leader stayed long enough to be held to the last pivot’s results.
SYSTEM DRIVER - MOS
Any decision to cut a merchandise category needs to run through one explicit test before approval: will this customer buy something else in the store, or will she leave the store entirely.
If the honest answer is leave, the cut requires named executive sign off with the customer loss modeled and stated out loud, not folded into a routine assortment review where it reads like a footnote.
LEADER DRIVER - INTERNAL OPERATING SYSTEM (IOS) - REGULATE
Epictetus wrote, “Know first who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.”
The override missing across a decade of Kohl’s leadership was the discipline to hold that identity through a bad quarter instead of borrowing a competitor’s playbook to relieve the pressure of that quarter.
Bender is the first to say the quiet part out loud instead of running the next pivot.
IF YOU DO ONE THING TODAY
Name the one product, service, or customer segment your organization quietly deprioritized in the last two years while chasing a competitor’s playbook.
Put a real number on what leaving that lane has cost you, today, and bring it to the next leadership meeting by name.
FINAL SIGNAL
A store that keeps trying to be someone else eventually teaches its customers where to go find them.
CTA
Find out where your gap is before it costs you. Score your own gap here, takes about three minutes.
mosei.org/gap-diagnostic.html
SOURCES
CNBC, “How Kohl’s lost its way, and is trying to become relevant again,” June 27, 2026.
Honestly, the hardest part isn't realizing you've lost your identity... it's trying to convince a board that misses quarterly targets to sit tight and hold the line anyway. (Of course, easier said than done when Wall Street is breathing down your neck...)