Please Mind the Gap

Management also said that reaction to summer merchandise was "mixed." So how did they surpass expectations?

By pruning jobs and costs like they were going out of style quicker than the clothes, which, unfortunately, have been out of style since pretty much forever.

"We feel we have more control over the cost side," said Byron H. Pollitt Jr., the company's CFO. But you can't cut costs forever, which is why cost cutting as a road to profitability when revenues are declining always has to be mentioned front and center.

Our own TheStreet.com also failed to mention the contribution of cost cuts prominently enough in a story called Bright Spots Emerge From Gap that also described Gap as taking off like a Lear jet toward the Land of Recovery: "In a sign it could be turning a corner..." the article began.

No one -- no one -- turns a corner with declining revenue and same-store sales. TheStreet.com was happy with the share buyback announcement and -- importantly -- the company recently completed another buyback program (announced plans to buy back shares, the business media tends to overlook, aren't always completed).

Anyhow, The Business Press Maven, who made nice money owning the Gap in the early 1990s, will always keep an eye on it. But as things currently stand, reports of its coming back from the dead have been greatly exaggerated. They all receive The Business Press Maven's dreaded "Back of the Hand" award.

Offering an apt comparison this week was coverage of Barnes and Noble(BKS Quote). (Full disclosure: I have a book coming out next year -- A Cold Blooded Business -- that will be distributed by Sterling, a subsidiary of Barnes and Noble.) Here, the contributor to that company's better-than-expected earnings was something more tangible than cost cuts, a book: more specifically, Harry Potter. But if you can find an article that does not mention that contribution of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the headline or first two paragraphs, do let me know. I guess the contribution of a book to a bottom line, at least this particular book, is easier to understand, what with customers lined up at midnight to buy it. Will they do the same for A Cold Blooded Business? Just for a moment, let a guy with three kids to send to college dream...