As a boy, J.C. Penny began his first business by raising hogs on his father’s farm.
The neighbors offered him scraps from their kitchens for his hogs. When he sold the first hog and made a profit, he bought more hogs and made more profit. But his father was soon to teach him the Golden Rule that was to guide him the rest of his life.
The neighbors began to complain about the smell and noise coming from Jim’s pigpen. Mr. Penney ordered Jim to sell the pigs. He was stunned. He reasoned with his father that all pigpens smelled and all pigs were noisy. And besides, the neighbors had no business telling them what to do. Mr. Penney listened and then said, “You have no right to make money if by so doing you are taking advantage of other people.”
Jim sold the pigs, much to his regret. But his godly father taught him a lesson that day – one of the most important he ever learned.
JAMES C.PENNEY (1875 – 1971)
James Cash Penney was born on a farm near Hamilton, Missouri. His parents eked out a living on the farm, and his father was the pastor of a small Baptist church. Penney left Missouri because of his health and moves to Colorado. After failing in a butcher shop there, he got a job in a general store. Then he bought a partnership in a store in Kemmerer, Wyoming. He later established other stores, the Golden Rules, which eventually became the J.C. Penney chain. He established the James C. Penney Foundation to aid religious, scientific, and educational projects. His autobiography is Fifty Years with the Golden Rule (1950). He wrote another book in 1960, View from the Ninth Decade. He was known as one of the world’s greatest merchants, seeing his one store in Wyoming grow to a chain of over seventeen hundred.
