Target Lowers Prices on 5,000 Items for the Summer

[Alpha8472]

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Target seems to love the peg board. Many of the walls are painted gray now. It seems very dull and colorless.

[ItsAshleyFTW]

I think Target is a nicer environment to shop in, even if it costs a little more than Walmart.

I agree

Are picture uploads working again if I don't use the phone for them? I could randomly point my phone around that Walmart and take ten pictures that would make your jaw drop. If every Walmart in the country looked like that I doubt Target would be in business. That picture of Target looks like everything that is wrong with them today. The biggest feature is empty pegboard. Did they hire the merchandisers who ruined Kohl's?

I've been to the Walmart Supercenter in North Bergen NJ and I must say it looks beautiful. Mannequins in the clothing department and large, easy-to-read signs in the grocery aisle. There are a lot of regular Walmarts still in NJ and they have not been updated in a long time. Even a few Supercenters I went to looked like you were traveling back into 2012 when you walked in.

However, Target does have its advantages. Every Target I go to has price scanning tablets that show in-store price and availability while Walmart got rid of those years ago. Target stores are also less crowded so it is easy to make a quick trip. The closest Target is a 5 minute drive from my house, it's a Greatland store with CVS, Starbucks, ICEE Machine, and Coca-Cola Freestyle.


And about a previous post saying Target has jacked up prices in NYC, yes that is mostly true but it depends on the borough a bit. Manhattan tends to have the highest prices while Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx are a bit lower. Staten Island's prices are the same as in NJ. Also worth noting is that in NYC, certain categories of product are locked behind glass shelves. What items are locked up depends on the store but it tends to be health and baby products, electronics, detergent, and clothing.

[ClownLoach]

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Target seems to love the peg board. Many of the walls are painted gray now. It seems very dull and colorless.

I walked through a SuperTarget yesterday to look more closely. They have been in the middle of resetting all of foods this year and doing some dubious SKU reductions then adding different SKUs back. Apparently the "push" test where they tried to reduce to effectively just a Pfresh assortment with the oversized food department was already killed. This is the one that would set for example three 4 foot shelves all with one SKU of Heinz Ketchup and eliminate the other couple dozen SKUs. Very Aldi like. The operations people liked it because it emptied the back room entirely, so I do suspect it will make it's way to more of the rural low volume SuperTarget stores that probably never should have been built in the mid to late 2000s. What is different from past low volume Super initiatives is that they tried testing keeping the full perimeter of deli, bakery and expanded produce where in previous cases those departments are closed, sometimes just walled over with the equipment effectively "entombed" behind drywall.

Anyway all new foods sets remove the nice black pegboard covers, the black c-channels with woodgrain at the top that frame in the aisle, and they all have terrible gaps at the top and bottom of the sets. I saw for example the aisle with foil and plastic wrap and there are only four shelves. You could probably fit all the product in about 8 feet looking good but instead it's spread out across 20 feet and literally no merchandise in the bottom 18 inches. That's right, no product on the base deck. The whole display just looks like white peg board and seems incomplete or has that "going out of business look." Worse, for reasons I can't comprehend, the very expensive shelf pusher and divider equipment Target has been installing for years that automatically pushes product forward and keeps the aisle faced appears to be getting removed and tossed in these new foods sets. It took me a while to realize this until I compared new bleak sets with no graphics versus the aisles that still have old sets, black panels and wood trim. That is very expensive equipment. I wonder if they decided that it isn't worth the labor expense of installing them? Or if they removed these due to the short term SKU reduction/backroom push tests that appear to have ended and they need to put them back once all the aisles are done being reset.

I am wondering if Target fired all their graphics designers and decided not to replace them? Graphics and signage helped make Target look a lot better than it probably is/was. These barren, plain displays with apparently intentionally empty and what appear to be missing shelves are the worst visual merchandising I have seen in any national chain retailer ever. Like there is no rational reason for this. Add more facings of aluminum foil because it isn't going to spoil and there is so much holding capacity but so little product that it probably is now requiring daily stocking to keep the aisle full despite taking far more space than it needs to.

Target was really looking a lot better in 2022 and especially 2023 in many areas, but clearly 2024 is a massive step backwards from a merchandising and operational standpoint. Employees are still poorly supervised and have horrible dress standards. They don't care about the brand which I explained elsewhere is the antithesis of the entire history of Target where you literally could and would be fired with the exact reason listed "Not aligned with fast, fun and friendly values." There is no pride in the store teams anymore. Customers are looked at like they're an annoyance which is a cultural problem that forms when labor is slashed to the bone and employees are micro managed; they become jaded about the entire concept of helping the customer when it is the customer that pays their paycheck. It is past time for a CEO change before sales begin to take a real nose dive as he is destroying that company. The only things that are stopping me from shifting away from Target to Walmart are the lack of WM stores in my area, my closest store is a poor condition old division 1 with minimal foods and I have to drive past 3 other Targets to get to the really good Walmart where unfortunately there are some upsetting pricing issues recently.

But never did I think I'd see the day where Walmart has better, happier and more professional employees where I see the same people on a regular basis and know their names and they recognize me as a repeat local customer. I never thought I'd see the day where Walmart is a brighter, cleaner, more pleasant and exciting store to shop than Target. They have rapidly evolved in these remodeled stores from being a utilitarian environment at best to having some truly show-stopping fun and exciting displays everywhere you look. They've also become incredibly good at having the right product in the right place at the right time so you wind up impulse buying much more than you came in for. I would love to see the CEO of Target walk through that Walmart and see how he reacts.

[ClownLoach]

Back on topic, Target has a total operating margin of 5.4%. Last year it was 3.7%, indicating that maybe a maximum of 1.7% of any given price increase was discretionary to increase profit. Or your $100.00 transaction became $101.70. And we know that isn't really accurate either as Target had problems with overstocks and had to do a lot of clearance markdowns in 2022 & 2023. So these aren't likely to be big markdowns.

In fact I question if there will be any at all. I noticed that many of the items on the list of 5,000 lowered prices had already been marked down weeks or months ago, some before the holidays. So unless they cut more today which is unlikely, this is a totally fake promotion. Target did acknowledge that many of these markdowns were already on the shelves.

[storewanderer]

I looked up a lot of items on Target.com that I have bought the past couple months and nothing has decreased in price. Food, pet, etc. At least the prices are the SAME as what I paid and haven't gone up- which IS a positive since the grocers are posing tons of rather large price increases storewide every week (especially Kroger).

I am not sure if this is some kind of a PR thing to fool gullible customers into thinking Target is doing them a favor or what, but at this point with as tight as money has gotten for many customers, I am not sure the customer is "that stupid" anymore...

I almost wonder if a "price freeze" campaign would have been more successful for Target. "this BBQ sauce- it is the same price as it was in 10/2023- and we will freeze its price until 10/2024 so you can enjoy your summer and not worry about a surprise price hike on your favorite..." .....

[storewanderer]

Target threw another "food and grocery" $5 off $30 coupon. Their food pricing is terrible and I actually see what seem like price increases this week compared to last week... Using the coupon got their prices about down to Wal Mart levels, at best, but I think I still ended up paying more than I would have at WinCo or possibly even Smiths.

Also ridiculous number of "must buy 2" sale prices and not even hot sale prices on those items.

[ClownLoach]

Target threw another "food and grocery" $5 off $30 coupon. Their food pricing is terrible and I actually see what seem like price increases this week compared to last week... Using the coupon got their prices about down to Wal Mart levels, at best, but I think I still ended up paying more than I would have at WinCo or possibly even Smiths.

Also ridiculous number of "must buy 2" sale prices and not even hot sale prices on those items.

And they're creating more opt in required circle offers on the app but no notification, no email, no automatic application. After paying I saw I had a special coupon $10 off $50 groceries. I could have saved $10 but I didn't notice until it was too late.

[storewanderer]

Target threw another "food and grocery" $5 off $30 coupon. Their food pricing is terrible and I actually see what seem like price increases this week compared to last week... Using the coupon got their prices about down to Wal Mart levels, at best, but I think I still ended up paying more than I would have at WinCo or possibly even Smiths.

Also ridiculous number of "must buy 2" sale prices and not even hot sale prices on those items.

And they're creating more opt in required circle offers on the app but no notification, no email, no automatic application. After paying I saw I had a special coupon $10 off $50 groceries. I could have saved $10 but I didn't notice until it was too late.

The offers seem to be showing up when you do item searches on the app. That is how I've been finding these mysterious category offers which I seem to be getting every week from them now on food.

The bigger problem I see is if you keep throwing $10 off $50, $5 off $25, $5 off $30, $5 off $15, grocery, offers, this makes me think your prices must be high and that is why you are doing this every week... that isn't exactly accurate but their pricing isn't great. Better than Safeway of course, but that isn't saying much.

They're also missing private label basic items in many categories and this is a recent development as they previously had private label in these items. I wanted private label instant oatmeal packets- all they had was Organic and it was over $3. I can get these at Kroger or Wal Mart for under $2. I also wanted some private label cereal bars- again they had none. Only some organic ones or the name brand Nutri Grain. Again bought elsewhere. So you could say they are trying to focus more on Organic and not conventional items. That could be nice. But then you go over to the Seltzer area where they used to have 1 L private label (no sugar of any kind) seltzer waters (which were great) and they discontinued those, but kept a bunch of 1 L "clear sodas" with that very bad artificial sweetener sucralose.

[ClownLoach]

Target threw another "food and grocery" $5 off $30 coupon. Their food pricing is terrible and I actually see what seem like price increases this week compared to last week... Using the coupon got their prices about down to Wal Mart levels, at best, but I think I still ended up paying more than I would have at WinCo or possibly even Smiths.

Also ridiculous number of "must buy 2" sale prices and not even hot sale prices on those items.

And they're creating more opt in required circle offers on the app but no notification, no email, no automatic application. After paying I saw I had a special coupon $10 off $50 groceries. I could have saved $10 but I didn't notice until it was too late.

The offers seem to be showing up when you do item searches on the app. That is how I've been finding these mysterious category offers which I seem to be getting every week from them now on food.

The bigger problem I see is if you keep throwing $10 off $50, $5 off $25, $5 off $30, $5 off $15, grocery, offers, this makes me think your prices must be high and that is why you are doing this every week... that isn't exactly accurate but their pricing isn't great. Better than Safeway of course, but that isn't saying much.

They're also missing private label basic items in many categories and this is a recent development as they previously had private label in these items. I wanted private label instant oatmeal packets- all they had was Organic and it was over $3. I can get these at Kroger or Wal Mart for under $2. I also wanted some private label cereal bars- again they had none. Only some organic ones or the name brand Nutri Grain. Again bought elsewhere. So you could say they are trying to focus more on Organic and not conventional items. That could be nice. But then you go over to the Seltzer area where they used to have 1 L private label (no sugar of any kind) seltzer waters (which were great) and they discontinued those, but kept a bunch of 1 L "clear sodas" with that very bad artificial sweetener sucralose.

I do not understand what they are doing. They were making noticeable improvements in 2023, trying to reinvest in the all-but-defunct Super format, and beating Walmart on price with private label foods. Now they have these disastrous SKU reductions that are being randomly tested in stores which leave the customer having to make another stop elsewhere. That one "push" test that basically turned the department into Aldi with 60+ facings of one single ketchup SKU (brand name not even store brand) has still not been completely reversed. The stripping of the store signage and decor to a bare bones warehouse feel also apparently is a random test in some stores but not all. Apparently the closest Super location near me got hit with testing both the bleak blank store test and SKU reduction. Obviously nobody at Target understands the concept that you cannot run multiple tests at the same time in the same store or you run the risk of skewing the results. They need to stop screwing around with bizarre tests that render one store in an area useless to the customer and get back to what built the entire company: simplicity and consistency.

[storewanderer]

I do not understand what they are doing. They were making noticeable improvements in 2023, trying to reinvest in the all-but-defunct Super format, and beating Walmart on price with private label foods. Now they have these disastrous SKU reductions that are being randomly tested in stores which leave the customer having to make another stop elsewhere. That one "push" test that basically turned the department into Aldi with 60+ facings of one single ketchup SKU (brand name not even store brand) has still not been completely reversed. The stripping of the store signage and decor to a bare bones warehouse feel also apparently is a random test in some stores but not all. Apparently the closest Super location near me got hit with testing both the bleak blank store test and SKU reduction. Obviously nobody at Target understands the concept that you cannot run multiple tests at the same time in the same store or you run the risk of skewing the results. They need to stop screwing around with bizarre tests that render one store in an area useless to the customer and get back to what built the entire company: simplicity and consistency.

It is hard to take them seriously on grocery. They have the potential, they have the foot traffic, in many cases they have the right physical facility, but they just can't seem to help themselves... Meanwhile Wal Mart just keeps on... doing its thing... on grocery. Wal Mart again posted record profits again this is all due to that grocery business they have and their ability to get massive profits out of that grocery business...

I almost think at this point it may do Target good to follow the thing Kmart did in the 90's with Big Kmart. Only they need to go full grocery- add in STAFFED bakery/deli and full grocery. 100% prepack meat with no butcher- fine- do it that way... that is the way the meat business is going anyway... Reset ALL stores (unless the lease prohibits it), get grocery in the same place in all stores with the same square footage/common layout/common mix. Figure out the logistics and make it happen.