There aren't a lot of levers left for J.C. Penney (NYSE:JCP) to pull in the short term that might meaningfully move the company's stock price higher. SG&A has been cut about as much as it can and is holding steady at around $1B per quarter. Without new stores and big increases in SG&A, gross sales can only increase so much, even if the economy continues to improve ever so gradually. And easy sales comps will become harder to come by as time goes by and the missteps of the Johnson era fade further into the past. The one metric to watch out for is Gross Margin, and this is a sleeper that could awaken the stock big time in the next couple of quarters. I'm actually surprised that more upgrades didn't follow last quarter's earnings, especially given the forward-looking nuggets that J.C. Penney Management was dropping on the conference call. Let's take a look at a few of these and see what they might portend for Gross Margin performance moving forward.