Less than two years after its much-anticipated arrival in Canada, Target will officially close and retreat south of the border on Sunday, after what experts are calling one of the most disastrous retail ventures in Canadian history.
Sunday will mark the end of that failed venture, as Target shutters the last of its 133 locations and eliminates 17,600 jobs from the Canadian retail job market.
Law student Harrison Jordan, 22, plans to hold a mock funeral for the retailer, before it closes its doors for good. Jordan says he became Target’s first Canadian customer when he purchased a Snickers bar at the grand opening of the Guelph, Ont. store in 2013.
Now, Jordan says he will close the “circle of retail life” by holding a funeral for the company at its Toronto Stockyards location on Saturday. He says there will be a bagpiper in attendance and, if things go well, he hopes to buy another Snickers bar before the store closes.
Retail analyst Doug Stephens says it didn’t have to end this way for Target, which arrived in Canada with sky-high expectations in 2013. Customers used to shopping at U.S. Target locations went in expecting low prices and great selection at the Canadian version of the store. Instead, they often encountered empty shelves and higher-than-expected prices.
“This was Target’s market to lose, and they did exactly that,” Stephens told CTV News Channel on Friday.
Stephens dismissed the notion that Canadians weren’t prepared to embrace the American retailer. Instead, he says Target wasn’t ready to handle its own aggressive expansion plan in a country that was excited for its arrival.
“Everyone was really looking forward to Target coming into the country,” Stephens said. “They just simply didn’t execute from an operational standpoint.”
Stephens blamed part of Target Canada’s failure on its decision to take over the many retail spaces once held by Zellers, which folded its operations in 2013.
“That took Target into a lot of locations that it probably shouldn’t have been in, a lot of locations that Canadian shoppers wouldn’t really associate with the Target experience,” Stephens said.
Big retailers have had it tough in Canada lately. Target joins a long list of Canadian- and American-owned companies to pull out of the country in recent years, including Future Shop, Zellers, Sony, Mexx and Jacob.
But Stephens says Target’s failure was one of the worst. “The only one that might rival it was the Eaton’s collapse in the 1990s,” he said. “It was really just a calamity from the beginning, and even their exit from Canada hasn’t exactly been delicate.”
Target continued to leave customers disappointed even after it declared bankruptcy. Many grumbled about the store’s lacklustre liquidation sales, which were administrated by a court-appointed monitor.
Stephens said the failure of Target Canada is indicative of the parent company’s greater struggles.
“The U.S. Target experience isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “They’ve lost a lot of the wind from their sails.”
