Ready, Aim, Fired

So now Target is leaving the Canadian market. That had been suggested by market watchers for months, but I had assumed it was just the paranoia of folks who just look at the short-term bottom line. I didn't think they'd actually do it. And in one final moment of incompetent hubris for old-times-sake, they didn't tell their own employees, leaving them to find out from the media.

It's still hard to believe just how this all went so bad so quickly. Mostly when the media has reported on the company's problems, they've gone straight to the prices as the explanation, noting they aren't as good as the process at American outlets. Personally I doubt that's a big reason. Canada's news outlets have been banging the cross-border shopping fear drum so long that I think they've greatly overestimated the number of Canadians that have been to an American Target.

The should be obvious, but hardly-mentioned truth is that Target's competitor was not is American stores, it was Canadian Walmarts. Walmart has established as identity as being cheap and reliable, while Target's image was of nothing but mediocrity. Personally, I didn’t have that much experience with them, but even I found those experiences were mostly negative.

I mentioned my initial disappointment.  Later, I went looking for running shoes, only to find the men's shoe aisle was mostly empty due to their infamous supply problems.  There was another time I tried to buy a shirt, but found (1) they hadn't bothered to put checkouts at the store's mall entrance as well as the outside entrance, and (2) arriving at the checkouts, I found a security guard futily trying to herd people into one big lineup instead of just letting them choose their own checkout. Recently, I was shopping for a new computer, and wondered how prices at department stores measured up to the electronics retailers.  Walmart's web site made it easy to get some prices on lap tops.  Target's site didn't give any info on products, other than letting you peruse a scan of their latest fliers.

A lot of the problem goes back to their curious decision to close all the Zellers stores, sell everything off, remodel over the course of months, then reopen. Of course, the remodelling was just painting Target red over Zellers red, and replacing plain shelves with plain shelves, so it was all a big waste. That wasted money may have been a one-off, but I think it really hurt them. It may have framed them as arrogant, but worse, it set everyone up for disappointment. It’s hard to be impressed when someone has taken five months to arrive back where they started.

But besides the repercussions of their poor entry, there’s also the implications it has for things we can’t see. That is, if the publicly visible aspects were so flawed, who knows what was going on behind the scenes. Hopefully a disillusioned executive will write a tell-all book about what went wrong.

It would be nice if we could put everything back the way it was, resurrecting Zellers.  I see some people are already campaigning for it. I couldn't find any info on Zellers' financial health, but I was under the impression they weren't losing the billion-plus a year that Target was losing.  But I doubt that will happen.  Hopefully someone will step in and provide a competitor to Walmart.  Giant Tiger, you may be our only hope.