How Target Lost $7 Billion

Target failed in Canada and they absolutely deserve it. Did you know that at one point Target tried to expand into Canada? It was a massively embarrassing failure. Let's see why Target failed in Canada.
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Thank you so much for supporting my channel and my work. This is a one man show and I do literally everything for this channel. I love making videos for you all. Thank you for letting me do this. -Nate
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Business:

[modernbusinesschannel]

Do you think Target deserved their failure in Canada? -Nate

[RayJerry]

Another big factor that wasn't really mentioned in this video was the price difference between US and Canadian stores. Canadians have the internet too (not to mention the regular cross-border shoppers) and can calculate exchange rates and saw they were getting taken for a ride on whatever paltry stock was even available. A lot of the stuff was at least 30% or more higher than in the US stores and more expensive than all of their so-called Canadian competitors at the time. They tried to get by on brand recognition alone and thought they could get a premium for it from gullible Canadians but was just another reason they fell flat on their faces.

[Chimpur]

I knew someone who worked there. They said the reason for things not fitting into shipping containers, trailers and and even on the shelves was that.. Well.. inches and centimetres are not the same. If something is entered as 5cm wide.. it will not fit in that space if its actually 5 inches.

[uncommon_niagara]

Empty shelves, high prices & no website = retail doom.

[murrethmedia]

As a Canadian when they came to Canada it left a really sour taste in my mouth, so I never went. First they were taking over and renaming a legendary Canadian brand, Zellers. But the biggest thing is how they handled Zellers employees. They made all of them reapply for their own jobs. I'm not down with companies that mistreat their workers, so I never shopped there.

[aXentOG]

My wife is Canadian and she talks vividly about how bad Target was. People in Toronto went to places like No Frills, FreshCo, or Walmart, and Target came in asking for like a 25% markup on all the same exact items that already existed in other retailers and quite quickly failed

[MedalionDS]

Canadian here... it was a weird time for this much talked about American retail place, it really wasn't much in display (shelves were plentiful but lots and lots of huge gaps of merch on display made it look weirdly empty) but I kinda miss them sometimes

[PillowEgg]

I remember going to Target, it was well stocked and clean, but there were barely any customers in the store. There were barely any deals at all, everything was msrsp. It was no different than going to Walmart, just a different logo at the door.

[jamesdr]

Target purchased Zellers sight unseen: no 'as-builts' or site surveys that caused sky-rocketing construction costs. One store had a pylon run through a sewer line, causing delays. Another issue was that Target did not identify that people choose to travel the the USA for good prices: Canadian prices were much higher. The expansion was doomed from the start by overzealous executives that believed they could no wrong. The biggest looser-laid off employees in the US. At least they received severence pay. US contractors working in Canada got pennies on the dollar or nothing for their work.

[kutter_ttl]

And now Zellers is back. Not as a standalone but as a store-in-store inside select HBC locations.

[otakubullfrog]

You really don't get a second chance to make a first impression. I'm sure that a lot of Canadians wanted to try out a store that was famous in America, but not enough to keep going back to a clearly half-finished one. A physical store will only have so many people in driving distance, so it's doomed if it disappoints too many of them.

[yaughl]

I remember when Target opened in Canada. Not only were there empty shelves, what was in stock in the food area was usually expired.

[AnalogWolf]

I remember going from Minneapolis (Target's HQ) to Winnipeg for a few weeks to work there as an engineer at a company that was moving from Canada to the Twin Cities. I had to be interviewed by secondary immigration to confirm my employment status, contact the company, etc. While in secondary, I saw a lady saying she was moving to Winnipeg to work at a Target, and I thought it was cool that a MN company was coming up north. Man, I feel bad for her now as she lost her job after all the hassle and expense of moving to a new country. I hope she is better now, but she got screwed by Target.

[DMNXKN]

don't let it be a like modern baseball hiatus we miss you Nate much love

[RsSooke]

I couldn’t understand this when it happened. Target came and went so hard.

As a kid on vacation visiting target in Southern California was so different than it was in Alberta and BC.

Target came into Canada around when my daughter was first born. I actually bought her baby clothes there a lot, they had great deals.

[willl.]

They failed to recognize their true competition. Wasn't just Walmart but Canadian Tire, Home Hardware, Rona, Dollarama, Giant Tiger, Marks, etc. All with established supply chains.

When Walmart opened they immediately had Canadian made products like their name brand jeans or food product. This sped up delivery time and control. Their jeans were actually very good.

Back to Target. The only Target products I bought was from Dollarama where on the back of things I saw Target Canada. Fire sale anybody.😊

[nerdisaur]

I remember that people were furious that target failed not because they liked target, but because they killed zellers and when they closed, that ended a lot of people’s access to Starbucks. Nobody really cared about target. Not to mention a lot of targets excess product was already being sold in the maritimes and Atlantic provinces, so out there they knew immediately that real target was shit.

[echopc]

Besides hubris, another reason they failed was the SKU's themselves. A lot of the products that Canadian cross-boarder shoppers loved to buy in Target USA were not available in Target CAN. But this is the same mistake a lot of retailers make when going international. They try to 'go local, ' and when means goint head to head with Walmart it doesnt work. Marks and Spensers made the same mistake in Canada. They were essentially no different from a Winners store. Tesco's made the same mistake in the USA.. they were indistinguishable from Tops or Albertsons. It's like Tim Hortons now trying to make it in the US.... they have already changed their coffee so it tastes like the same swill you get at Dunkins or 7-11

[PWingert]

Actually, it was worse than that. The supply chain software was from an Israeli company and had never been tested on this scale before. It was originally designed for a small to medium-sized business with one or two warehouses and was not set up for communications with suppliers initially. That combined with bad data being loaded into an untested system riddled with bugs and not designed to work at a scale of millions f products, dozens of warehouses and hundreds of stores.

[smalltowns]

Are you out of business? No vid in 9 months!