JCPenney

You can’t even get to the second floor children’s area if you have a stroller. No escalator or elevator. Ridiculous!

I love the Astoria JC Penny! Very cozy and personable atmosphere. Everyone usually has a smile on there face and very helpful staff! It’s a pleasure shopping there! Wish the store was a little bigger though to accommodate more products.

Great to find a ‘good olé store’ before all the malls sprang up. This looks exactly, they all did, like the store in my home town. The customer service was good, the sales people knew what was in the store without looking on the computer. will go back next time in Astoria.

This is as good as it ever was. My father was a JCPenney manager in the 1970s and 1980s and this store was nearly identical to the one I grew up visiting as a child in a small town in Wisconsin. If you wan to know what JCPenney was like before the age of the box store visit Astoria’s JCPenney. The service is personable, the prices appropriate, and selection surprisingly large in this tribute to a bygone era.

Growing up in suburban Southern California, J.C. Penney always seemed to be one of the less-​desirable big-​box stores anchoring a corner of a sprawling shopping mall — virtually indistinguishable from Sears, the May Company, and so on. But in a small storefront on historic Astoria’s main drag, it feels like a piece of small-​town Americana, unchanged since the ‘50s.
I didn’t travel to Astoria to shop at Penney’s — I had to pee, and it was the nearest shop with a public restroom.
Face it, you’re probably not going to find what you’re looking for here. It’s a J.C. Penney, after all, and about ¹⁄₅ the size of a standard one. But as a relic of a bygone era, a reminder of the way we used to shop, in a quiet coastal town, it’s an oddly fascinating destination.

This is what shopping was like before the «Mall» came along and nearly made stores like this one extinct. Fortunately this Penney’s store has withstood time. You have to go here just for the experience but buying something here would definitely help keep this historic store alive. When I first walked in I could smell and feel it’s age and images of days gone by when my grandparents would take us to their neighborhood department store the Archer Big Store on Archer avenue or take me & my little brother down to «Jew Town» also on the southside at Roosevelt & Halsted for Grandpa to get some new shoes then over to Maxwell Street for some socks and undershirts. They weren’t department stores though because each store sort of specialized in a different line of clothing. You had your shoe stores, jacket & coat store, and clothing stores. All that is now gone, well at least Maxwell street, the place where I bought my first leather jacket is gone. There are still some store fronts on Roosevelt but it’s just not the same anymore.
Getting back to Penney’s… When you’re in downtown Astoria take a trip down your own memory lane by visiting the Penney’s store and their neighbors there on Commercial Street and enjoy the nostalgia before it turns into a strip mall someday.