storewanderer wrote: ↑November 17th, 2019, 6:47 pm
The ship has already sailed for Target in small towns for the most part. There may be some isolated locations where they are successful in little small towns of under 20,000 people but I can't think of any.
There are nine communities of less than 20,000 people, and outside of a larger metro area, in Target's home state of Minnesota that have a Target store: Alexandria, Baxter, Bemidji, Cambridge (which is, in fairness, something of a bedroom community to the Twin Cities), Grand Rapids, Hutchinson, Red Wing, Virginia, and Willmar. In general, these stores date from the early-to-mid 1990s, with remodels and possibly an addition or two made along the way.
As to how successful these locations are nowadays; well, there used to be Targets in two additional rural communities of less than 20,000 in the state--Fergus Falls and New Ulm--but Target pulled out of each within the last five years. Target also withdrew from Austin, a city of about 25,000. The Austin and New Ulm stores were approximately 30 miles away from another, still open, Target.
Walmart competes in all of these locales and, apart from a couple of instances where they arrived much later, has since approximately the same time in the early-to-mid 90s when Target entered the scene. During the 1990s, I'd say Walmart and Target here were more or less equal. Rather than damaging each other, their greatest impact was probably damaging the established Kmart and Pamida stores that many of these places had prior to Walmart and Target's arrival.
Walmart started noticeably diverging around the mid-2000s, though, as, one-by-one, they replaced their original 1990s stores in the region with supercenters. Ever since, you look around at the traffic at the Walmart and Target in these communities, and Walmart will almost always be busier, potentially very significantly so. That said, Walmart too is noticeably facing some headwinds thanks to Aldi and Dollar General undertaking a major expansion within Minnesota during this decade.