Are there targets in canada

Email Signup. Target Brands. Advertise with Us. Bullseye Shop. Target's Coronavirus Response. Corporate Responsibility. Investor Relations. Help Target Help. Track Orders. Contact Us. Launching the Target brand in a new country was his biggest task to date. He listened patiently as two people in the room strongly expressed reticence about opening stores on the existing timetable.

Their concern was that with severe supply chain problems and stores facing the prospect of patchy or empty shelves, Target would blow its first date with Canadian consumers. Still, neither one outright advocated that the company push back its plans. The magnitude of what was at stake began weighing on some of those senior officials. They had overcome seemingly endless hurdles and worked gruelling hours to get to this point, and they knew there were costs to delaying. Postponement would mean pushing back even more store openings.

Everyone else in attendance expressed confidence in sticking to the schedule, and by the time the meeting concluded, it was clear the doors would open as promised. Roughly two years from that date, Target Canada filed for creditor protection, marking the end of its first international foray and one of the most confounding sagas in Canadian corporate history.

The debacle cost the parent company billions of dollars, sullied its reputation and put roughly 17, people out of work.

Target was a careful, analytical and efficient organization with a highly admired corporate culture. Not only that, but the chain expected to be profitable within its first year of operations. Why Target Canada collapsed has been endlessly dissected by analysts, pundits and journalists. But the people who know what happened best are the employees who lived through the experience.

Target declined to comment on specific issues, pointing to previous statements it has made on its Canadian venture. The former employees interviewed for this story requested anonymity to preserve relationships in the industry. Even those employees remain baffled by how Target Canada collapsed. In the fall of , hundreds of Target Canada head office staff piled into the auditorium at the Mississauga Living Arts Centre for a state-of-the-union address from their leaders.

The employees were weary and frustrated by this point. The bulk of the stores had opened, and it was clear the launch had gone seriously awry. Consumers were frustrated when confronted with empty shelves, and the media and financial analysts were hammering the company for it. On stage, Fisher stated his conviction that Target Canada was making progress and that would be a greatly improved year.

A man in the front row stood up and offered to field the question. Although Baker is a retail executive, he is, at heart, a real estate man. His maternal grandfather started buying and selling real estate in New York City in and helped pioneer the concept of shopping malls. In the s, he started selling some of it off to various companies, including Walmart. That relationship proved fortuitous in late , when Walmart approached him and offered to buy the Zellers chain from HBC.

Baker, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. It was an open secret that Target was interested in the Canadian market. But the company had previously decided it wanted to grow as quickly as possible if it were to enter Canada, rather than pursue a slow, piecemeal expansion.

The challenge was in acquiring enough real estate to make that possible. The Zellers sale provided just such an opportunity. The price Steinhafel paid raised eyebrows. But Steinhafel may have felt justified in making such a bold move. Steinhafel had joined Target in , and his entire professional career had been spent with the company. Target experienced steady growth during that time, and Steinhafel had simply become accustomed to succeeding.

Almost immediately, employees in Minneapolis were seconded to work on the Canadian launch. It was considered a privilege to be recruited. But there was also immense pressure. Timelines were hugely compressed. Building a new distribution centre from scratch, for example, might take a few years. Target was going to do it in less than two years—and it planned to construct three of them.

One of the most important decisions concerned technology—the systems that allow the company to order products from vendors, process goods through warehouses and get them onto store shelves promptly. In the U. Target faced a choice: Was it better to extend that existing technology to Canada or buy a completely new, off-the-shelf system?

Finding an answer was tricky. That plan had shortcomings as well. The technology was not set up to deal with a foreign country, and it would have to be customized to take into account the Canadian dollar and even French-language characters. Those changes would take time—which Target did not have. A ready-made solution could be implemented faster, even if the company had little expertise in actually using it.

The team responsible for the decision went with a system known as SAP, made by the German enterprise software company of the same name. Sobeys introduced a version of SAP in and abandoned the effort by Similarly, Loblaws started moving to SAP in and projected three to five years to get it done. The implementation took two years longer than expected because of unreliable data in the system. Target was again seeking to do the impossible: It was going to set up and run SAP in roughly two years.

Target believed the problems other retailers faced were due to errors in data conversion. Target, on the other hand, was starting fresh. There was no data to convert, only new information to input. By early , with the planned opening still a year away, the nerve centre for the Canadian launch had moved from Minneapolis to Mississauga, and waves of American expats settled up north.

Hiring was a top priority. Target has a unique, well-established corporate culture in the U. Target typically recruits candidates for these positions straight out of school and prepares them for a career in retail. And, do you think Target suffered from the fact that Canada was already an established market? I hope that they will remember the lessons from this failure as they try to enter other international markets! I had no idea. Cool post. And Canada is not Outer Mongolia, right? We should know how to do this.

I need to do a case on this!!! Interesting post Sid! Great read on how a successful US company pre data theft failed to expand into a close, neighbor! Was it a lack of understanding consumer demand or supply chain coordination in new market?

Pricing — how large was the mark up? Did customers actually save when taking into account transportation and convenience? Or was it more of an emotional let down?

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