UPDATE: JC Penney has since apologized for the wierd tweets. "Oops...Sorry for the typos. We were #TweetingWithMittens. Wasn't it supposed to be colder? Enjoy the game! #GoTeamUSA" Sounds like a cover up to us. What do you think? 
 
 JC Penney has become a hot topic on social media after the retailer posted a tweet that made absolutely no sense and seemed to be written by someone typing under the influence. "Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0" read the tweet posted on Sunday evening. Presumably the post was in connection to the Super Bowl, however, whoever wrote it clearly had no idea what they were tweeting about. There has been no comment from the store's account. 
 
 JC Penney's 'drunk tweet' has provoked some hilarious comments on the twittesphere. "Umm,@jcpenney, the intern you have doing your tweets is drunk," Tweeted one user. "If you need proof of how underperforming this brand is...RT @jcpenney," tweeted another. "Hacked by Macy's RT @jcpenney" suggested someone else. "Uhh..go home @jcpenney. Your social media person is drunk," tweeted one user. "Maybe @jcpenney's super creative Super Bowl ad strategy is alcohol." 
 
 The controversy comes just two days after TIME reported that JCPenney was raising its prices in order to slash them again for Valentines Day. s. “They had us up all night changing the prices on everything,” one J.C. Penney jewelry salesperson told the magazine. The outdated retailer has been accused of the tactic known as "price anchoring" for years. "Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this??" they just tweeted, with no explanation of the previous comment. 
 
 Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this??? — JCPenney (@jcpenney) February 3, 2014 
 
 Who is writing these tweets? #drunktweeting RT @jcpenney: Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0 — Christine Oliver (@ChristineOliver) February 2, 2014 
 
 Umm,@jcpenney, the intern you have doing your tweets is drunk. — Beth Szabo (@PolkaDotFoxTrot) February 2, 2014 ||||| JCPenney 
 
 He engineered the runaway success of Apple’s retail empire, but crashed and burned at the lowbrow department store. Daniel Gross on the fall of Ron Johnson. 
 
 Was Apple a smashing retail success because Ron Johnson, the executive who built Apple’s retail operations, was a retail genius? Or was Johnson deemed to be a smashing success in retail because of Apple’s genius for devising expensive, must-have products? 
 
 It sure seems like the latter: Johnson’s tumultuous 18-month tenure as chief executive officer of troubled department store chain JCPenney came to a unceremonious end Monday. 
 
 Johnson was hired as CEO in July 2011 and formally took the reins in November 2011. Johnson, who had spent the early part of his career at Target Corp., had risen to fame at Apple. He spent 11 years at the continually self-reinventing company, presiding over the aggressive rollout of a network of 300 stores. With their clean design, excellent customer service, and limited inventory of fast-moving, high-priced products—the iPod, the iMac, the iPhone, the iPad—Apple’s stores had become the envy of the retail world. In a world in which electronics were evolving into ever-cheaper, low-margin products, the Apple stores were cash machines. In 2012, they boasted sales-per-square-foot of $6,050—almost twice the total that jeweler-to-the-1-percent Tiffany’s sported. 
 
 LM Otero/AP Shoppers walk in a JCPenney story in Plano, Texas, June 19, 2012. 
 
 That got the attention of hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, who had amassed a significant stake in JCPenney and was looking for an executive to lead a turnaround. And so he hired Johnson in 2011 with great fanfare. But Johnson’s much-debated strategy of eliminating heavy discounts, sales, and coupons, alienated the stores’ core middle-class consumers. Instead of running ads emphasizing value pricing, as had been the practice at JCPenney, Johnson shifted to running ads that emphasized the lifestyle benefits of the company’s merchandise, as Apple did. He tried to go upscale by recruiting fashion designers and Martha Stewart to have an enhanced presence in the stores. The latter move embroiled JCPenney in highly public and distracting litigation with Macy’s, which had a longstanding contract with Stewart. 
 
 But instead of biting the bullet and paying full price, as customers do at Apple stores, JCPenney’s shoppers simply stayed away. And the bright lights and Apple aura didn’t succeed in bringing in the wealthy suburbanites and creative-class types who keep the registers ringing at Apple stores. JCPenney’s same-store sales fell a stunning 31 percent in the most recently concluded quarter from the prior year. With the losses mounting, the company began to lay off employees. The stock price has fallen by about half since January 2012. The only premium thing about Johnson turned out to be his compensation: tens of millions of dollar to replace the value of Apple stock he walked away from. 
 
 It’s a surprising turn of events. But it points out a larger issue in America’s commercial culture. When a phenomenon has an incredible run and swells in size and power—the dotcom boom in the 1990s, the real estate market in the 2000s, the 2008 Obama campaign, and Apple and social media today—it tends to acquire and exude a sense of infallibility. Everyone associated with it seems smarter, richer, better-looking, and more visionary than the rest of us. And everybody else wants a piece of the magic. 
 
 But markets aren’t always rational. They frequently overshoot on the upside, inflating values, reputations, and egos far above their underlying value. Take Apple’s stock. It has enjoyed an epic run, and increased sevenfold between October 2009 and last summer. But the stock has since fallen by about 40 percent. The net worths, and the reputations, of many of those associated with Apple have also been reduced since Apple’s stock peaked. ||||| Oh, come on now. 
 
 J.C. Penney shares, no stranger to the roller coaster, spiked in the past hour, apparently after — yes, we are not kidding you — this tweet from Nina Garcia: 
 
 I’m @jcpenney’s HQ. Thank you Ron Johson for the walk through of JCP’s prototype. Get ready to shop! Its going to be a game changer! 
 
 You might think Garcia is some powerful Wall Street analyst, right? Or even some rain-making M&A banker? Or some private equity specialist? 
 
 Uh, nope. 
 
 Garcia is fashion director at Marie Claire and a judge on Project Runway. (Hey, we had to look it up, too.) 
 
 The comment hit the Twitterverse at 2:02 p.m. ET; the stock had started spiking in the minutes before that (did somebody leak the tweet? Call the SEC!) It’s come down a bit since, but it is still up 5% on the day, at $22.05. 
 
 It’s hard to understand why exactly the stock spiked on this comment from Garcia. That the company’s redesigning its stores, the referred to “prototype,” isn’t news. The new design was unveiled this week, as Forbes noted. A thumbs-up from somebody in the fashion world of Garcia’s stature is surely nice, but – as one of our readers pointed out — Garcia was retained by J.C. Penney this month as the “resident style voice and fashion collection curator.” She’s not exactly an uninterested observer. 
 
 The stock got a boost last week as well, after Bill Ackman, whose Pershing Square Capital is Penney’s biggest shareholder, reiterated his support for CEO Ron Johnson. We get that. Ackman’s a huge name in the market, and his comments always move stocks. 
 
 Today’s spike occurred right around the time of Garcia’s tweet. Who’s buying stocks based on a tweet? Is that what the capital markets are coming to? Maybe, in some cases. That’s what happens when a stodgy, century-old retailer hires Johnson — a hotshot from Apple – to save the franchise and gets the momentum players interested. 
 
 We just wonder if the tradebots are co-located with Twitter’s servers as well as the NYSE’s. 
 
 Below, Dana Mattioli discusses J.C. Penney’s pricing strategy on Mean Street:
– JCPenney, drunk tweeter? Nah, it turns out the company's retail Twitter account was just pulling our collective leg—and attracting a little attention—by tweeting silly things, AdWeek reports. But it's kinda funny to see how the tweets drew the Doritos and Kia social media teams into taking potshots: JCPenney: Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0 JCPenney: Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this??? Kia: Hey @jcpenney need a designated driver? Doritos: Slow down, @jcpenney. Have some #Doritos . JCPenney: Oops...Sorry for the typos. We were #TweetingWithMittens . Wasn't it supposed to be colder? Enjoy the game! #GoTeamUSA. Yes, it was all to promote mittens. Very clever, JCP. But they're not always so funny: The Twitter stunt comes right after the retailer raised prices just to lower them for Valentine's Day, reports Latin Times. JCPenney has been accused of such "price anchoring" several times over the years.