Target 2022

Predicting the demise of Sears & Kmart since 2017!
storewanderer
Posts: 14379
Joined: February 23rd, 2009, 3:54 pm
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 298 times
Contact:
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by storewanderer »

Target seems to be offering a 15% off any purchase coupon good the next few days. Obviously they are struggling and need to get traffic.

Noticed a sign on the door that says they are reducing air conditioning use and reducing lighting to conserve energy. It is October and the daytime temperature is in the low 80s and at night it goes down to 45... Target has no windows other than its doors and no skylights. Not sure what they're doing but must desperately need to cut expenses. The lights all seemed to be on.

Store I went into was poorly stocked throughout home category like it has been in this area for a while but the store was neat and organized.

Found some items and went up to pay. Self checkout only. Some customers were demanding a cashier so the person watching self checkout was going back and forth behind a register. There were coupon stickers on two items I bought and when I scanned the first coupon, the screen said "this coupon is not valid at Target." Then it goes straight to pay screen. No wait for assistance like Kroger or Safeway or CVS self checkout when a coupon does not work. I asked for help. The employee came over and tried to go to store mode, but the machine froze so had to move me to the checkout and there the coupons worked just fine, so they seem to be trying to discourage coupons at self checkout even small value manufacturers coupons and not prompt for employee help like other stores when there is some kind of issue.

The items I bought were actually priced a little lower (pennies) than Wal Mart and adding the 15% off made it that much better.
Alpha8472
Posts: 3929
Joined: February 24th, 2009, 8:55 pm
Been thanked: 79 times
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by Alpha8472 »

Target is suffering from issues if they are having to reduce air conditioning at their stores. Do these stores have solar panels on the roof?

Many Target stores are too bright now due to the switch to LED lighting. Turning off half of the lights would still allow the store to be bright. During the Enron energy crisis, Target and other stores turned off some of their lights. I remember the neon on the walls at Target went dark.

I saw a Safeway with the ugly new LED lighting turn off the lights in sections of the store. It was probably the store manager trying to reproduce the old mood lighting effect in that unremodeled Lifestyle store.
storewanderer
Posts: 14379
Joined: February 23rd, 2009, 3:54 pm
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 298 times
Contact:
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by storewanderer »

Pretty sure no solar panels.
buckguy
Store Manager
Store Manager
Posts: 1003
Joined: January 31st, 2017, 10:54 am
Has thanked: 3 times
Been thanked: 61 times
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by buckguy »

Most likely the promotions are because this is Columbus Day weekend, which has often gotten the kind of attention you see on 2nd and 3rd tier long weekends. Online, it's a Christmas in October thing for Target. Veteran's Day, next month, probably will bring the same, although it's not a Monday holiday. Columbus Day now has different names in different localities, so they don't run the Columbus theme. There's also a school holiday around now in many places associated with teacher's meetings and in the more localized days of retail, that also would have had promotions.

It sounds like you have marginal stores that don't have competent local or regional managers. The weather here doesn't require much climate control now, but we didn't have any energy related activities when we had weeks of 100 degree days.
storewanderer
Posts: 14379
Joined: February 23rd, 2009, 3:54 pm
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 298 times
Contact:
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by storewanderer »

buckguy wrote: October 8th, 2022, 9:32 am Most likely the promotions are because this is Columbus Day weekend, which has often gotten the kind of attention you see on 2nd and 3rd tier long weekends. Online, it's a Christmas in October thing for Target. Veteran's Day, next month, probably will bring the same, although it's not a Monday holiday. Columbus Day now has different names in different localities, so they don't run the Columbus theme. There's also a school holiday around now in many places associated with teacher's meetings and in the more localized days of retail, that also would have had promotions.

It sounds like you have marginal stores that don't have competent local or regional managers. The weather here doesn't require much climate control now, but we didn't have any energy related activities when we had weeks of 100 degree days.
Well I have heard Target has been slammed with online fulfillment orders this weekend chainwide and didn't staff properly so perhaps this will get them some traction. I guess a 15% off everything promotion and some other "deals" really drove traffic.

There is a lot of controversy around framing this weekend for sales. At this point for retailers, any desperation move possible to get money out of the customer, I guess. https://www.axios.com/2021/10/10/retail ... us-peoples

I always forget about this day because in Nevada, it is not a State-observed holiday. Rather, Nevada observes Nevada Day around the end of the month as a state-observed holiday for October. So 10/10 was always a weird day where school was open, banks were closed, state government was open, but no mail showed up.
babs
Assistant Store Manager
Assistant Store Manager
Posts: 762
Joined: December 20th, 2016, 3:08 pm
Has thanked: 19 times
Been thanked: 64 times
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by babs »

Alpha8472 wrote: October 6th, 2022, 11:51 pm Target is suffering from issues if they are having to reduce air conditioning at their stores. Do these stores have solar panels on the roof?

Many Target stores are too bright now due to the switch to LED lighting. Turning off half of the lights would still allow the store to be bright. During the Enron energy crisis, Target and other stores turned off some of their lights. I remember the neon on the walls at Target went dark.

I saw a Safeway with the ugly new LED lighting turn off the lights in sections of the store. It was probably the store manager trying to reproduce the old mood lighting effect in that unremodeled Lifestyle store.
When Target switched to LED lighting, they went from four florescent tube fixtures to two LED tubes. They can't turn off half their lights since they already did that.
Alpha8472
Posts: 3929
Joined: February 24th, 2009, 8:55 pm
Been thanked: 79 times
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by Alpha8472 »

I remember supermarkets turning off entire rows of lights. Perhaps they could turn off alternating rows.

Kmart took out bulbs in their stores to make them darker years ago.

I remember a Petrini's supermarket that had dark mood lighting back in the 90s. It must have saved quite a bit of power back then.
ClownLoach
Valued Contributor
Valued Contributor
Posts: 2689
Joined: April 4th, 2016, 10:55 pm
Has thanked: 39 times
Been thanked: 288 times
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by ClownLoach »

storewanderer wrote: October 6th, 2022, 9:57 pm
Noticed a sign on the door that says they are reducing air conditioning use and reducing lighting to conserve energy. It is October and the daytime temperature is in the low 80s and at night it goes down to 45... Target has no windows other than its doors and no skylights. Not sure what they're doing but must desperately need to cut expenses. The lights all seemed to be on.

Store I went into was poorly stocked throughout home category like it has been in this area for a while but the store was neat and organized.
California, due to their poor management of the electric grid, has a program in place for retail big box stores called "demand response" where they were required to raise the AC temp to 78 and reduce lighting during all state mandated power "flex alerts.". I have heard of similar programs in parts of Oregon and Washington. My company was forced into this and we hated it - made our stores look like we were closing early for the day. We found out that the way out was to reduce the tier of electricity the stores would rise into and the best way to do it was the LED lighting retrofits. Most of our big box stores reduced their electricity bills by an astonishing 70% or more when we converted all the old florescent fixtures to LED, plus the stores became so much brighter customers walked in and complemented us on the store remodel (there wasn't one). That got us out of the tier that required participation in the demand response events and we were able to get every California store off the program. It could be that the Target you're shopping at for some reason was not able to retrofit lighting, refrigeration, HVAC, add solar etc to a point where they were able to reduce their power use to a level that is satisfactory for California so they are still mandated to participate in demand response. I noticed that the SuperTarget locations near me had about a quarter of their lights turned off, and all the in case lighting in refrigerated and frozen grocery, during the last big heat wave in September. I couldn't tell you if the HVAC was cut back because it was 117° outside and whatever it was set for inside felt pretty good.
ClownLoach
Valued Contributor
Valued Contributor
Posts: 2689
Joined: April 4th, 2016, 10:55 pm
Has thanked: 39 times
Been thanked: 288 times
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by ClownLoach »

Went to what is known as the "Disneyland Target" yesterday in Garden Grove, CA. Location on Harbor Blvd. About two miles south of the park. This is a very busy store, the Target my parents took me to shop in when I was a kid. Store was recently remodeled again and I saw a few interesting changes.

First, this location went to concrete floors and they are probably the worst ones I've seen in any Target. The building is one of the original California Target stores, I believe it was a FedMart. Nobody in their right mind would try to dig up that nasty subfloor. Trenches, pipe caps and all sorts of actual trip hazards especially around the front end although they somehow managed to remove the glue lines from the linoleum. Zero shine or polish. Really made me wonder what was the point of the conversion. This was worse than some of the horrific Ralphs and Fred Meyer conversions where they wound up going back and putting linoleum back down.

Second, this store is the first I've seen in California to implement the full next generation RFID system that they were testing in Las Vegas. It's an even newer version. There are giant 24 inch wide Zebra RFID antennas spread across the entire ceiling, wide RFID readers hanging over every door, etc. So Target must have found a way around the California laws that supposedly restrict the usage of this technology if it could be considered "customer tracking.". With the implementation they have which includes overhead door canopy readers, and even readers over the bathroom hallway, they can easily combine camera surveillance/facial recognition plus the triangulation of RFID tags to track exactly what items you have in your possession in the store. The implementation is clearly more than just for easier tracking of inventory (with this in place theoretically there is no longer a need to scan the shelves as they're constantly being counted by this system, and it also helps the store employees locate missing or out of place items like a GPS). And a shoplifter can easily be identified as they can say that they walked out the door with X items in their possession and didn't pay for them - which really bends the rules of the classic "5 steps to apprehension.". So I wonder if they will widen the usage of this system in California since they seem to be able to get away with using it here, and they wouldn't have spent millions of dollars installing it just to "test the waters" or "see if anyone notices and says something."

Finally - they have implemented levels of security that would probably be in place in San Francisco or other tough areas. For the first time Target seems to be significantly increasing the usage of glass case security. In the remodel they added Ulta Beauty, but nearly everything is behind full height glass doors. The entire laundry detergent aisle, all brands, was behind glass doors. Same for all the cell phone accessories and I saw glass cases scattered around in other departments where I had not seen them before at Target. I didn't have a reason to purchase anything that would be locked up in one, but they had what appears to be a electronic locking mechanism built into the base deck of the gondola and has a large key lock. It appears to be something that they can enable or disable. The doors are not sliding like traditional glass cases but open outwards like a cabinet. I am not even sure if they were actually locked in that laundry detergent aisle. Could be something that they lock and unlock depending on the time of day, if for example they have lots of theft at night they could just lock the doors at 7pm. Each door had two uniformed LP agents, self checkout was supervised at each end by a uniformed LP agent (who can't do anything to assist the customer on the register as they don't have a login), and there were at least two roaming the store again in uniform. By far the most glass cases and security I've ever seen at a Target and felt more like I was shopping at a red painted Walmart. Clearly Target, which historically has tried to protect ease of shopping for the customer, is suddenly moving to aggressively toughen their security levels to reduce shrink.
storewanderer
Posts: 14379
Joined: February 23rd, 2009, 3:54 pm
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 298 times
Contact:
Status: Offline

Re: Target 2022

Post by storewanderer »

ClownLoach wrote: November 4th, 2022, 8:27 am
storewanderer wrote: October 6th, 2022, 9:57 pm
Noticed a sign on the door that says they are reducing air conditioning use and reducing lighting to conserve energy. It is October and the daytime temperature is in the low 80s and at night it goes down to 45... Target has no windows other than its doors and no skylights. Not sure what they're doing but must desperately need to cut expenses. The lights all seemed to be on.

Store I went into was poorly stocked throughout home category like it has been in this area for a while but the store was neat and organized.
California, due to their poor management of the electric grid, has a program in place for retail big box stores called "demand response" where they were required to raise the AC temp to 78 and reduce lighting during all state mandated power "flex alerts.".
The Target store I visited with this sign posted (and it is still posted......) was in Nevada, not in California. There are no power grid issues in Nevada where this store is located. Nobody was ever asked to conserve energy in that area/county.
Post Reply