I was talking to some coworkers about this today and one for them predicted it would happen. And now he says Mcdonalds is the next one to leave Canada.
Wait, wait... McDonalds. That's... that's dumb. Restaurants and retail stores are two different beasts...
Well I am disappointed in the way the company operated up here in general I did buy more then a few things from them. Like a shiny new TV at a really good price. I do feel bad for all those people that are loosing there jobs and honestly hope that maybe Target will change its mind and only do a partial pull back and maybe just close half its locations instead of all of them.
Why the hell would your co-worker predict something and expect it to be true? Why would you believe them? The co-worker can pull anything out of their arse and claim they said it before hand and predicted it to happen after the fact. And quite frankly I find it very hard to believe that McDonalds would leave Canada, we're talking a multinational restaurant chain that is a huge giant of a corporation and that's got to be at least 500,000 restaurants in Canada alone... Maybe more, that's a rough estimate. They are constantly doing business, constantly making money and certainly not in any kind of issues that Target, as a retailer, dealt with. What about Sony? Did this co-worker supposedly predict their departure from Canadian operations on the exact same day? Not buying that kind of blatant stupidity. As far as Target leaving is concerned, I am greatly disappointed. Target Canada didn't get everything, but we were getting more Target exclusives than we were when they weren't in Canada and Winners was picking up unsold cases of exclusives cross-boarder for selling here.
I'm still kind of laughing at this. Does Target realize that they couldn't do what Wal-Mart did 20 years ago, without the benefit of the advanced technologies of today, and avoiding the mistakes that Wal-Mart had made during their move up to Canada? Wal-Mart was literally doing exactly the same thing 20 years ago...they took over virtually all the Woolco locations (most of them in malls), and renovated them into the blue and yellow color scheme. I doubt McD's would leave Canada...they've got 1,400 locations. Probably 100 in the Toronto and the surrounding area alone.
Actually stepped into the local Target today and it was busy as hell in there. While i was walking around picking a few needed items up I heard a couple of employees talking bitterly about the situation and about the customers. "Where were they when we needed them." Was the one that rang out the loudest.
Shopping for the stock that you didn't have at your competitors who had plenty of it on the shelves. Is what I would have said. Either that or, I was right here shopping for what I could find that you actually had around, which wasn't much.
It saddens me that i've finally realized Canada's now in a recession. we were doing so freaking well the last few years all things considered.
Oddly enough, McDonalds expanded into Canada relatively late in the game, after some other chains like KFC and A&W (fun fact: The Colonel spent a great deal of time in the 'Saug, to the point he has a memorial wing in Trillium hospital).
I'm curious, what makes you say we're in a recession? Because Target couldn't make a profit? Seriously, if we were in a recession I'm pretty sure the news media would be constantly bringing it up and reminding us daily that we suck, just like they did back when the States were in a recession. Mind you our situation isn't currently very promising. But we are a damn sight better than a recession would imply.
Yeah, this totally sucks. Shutting the whole operation down completely seems like a HUGE waste of potential. I'm not sure what Canadians were expecting, exactly... The prices were on par or cheaper than Walmart, for the most part. And all the stores I went to were comparable to ones in the US, in terms of size and layout... in fact, I've gone to some TERRIBLE Targets in the US (LA and Port Huron, MI come to mind) that were much, much worse than any of the ones I visited in Canada. I really have no idea what people are talking about when they repeat the whole "empty shelves" thing, either... I'm sure experiences varied depending on location and what not, but it's not something I ever experienced. They should have started smaller - a few stores in key markets, and build up from there. Target tried to do too much, too quickly. Classic hubris. Experiment? Seems like a pretty expensive experiment.
I would totally bust a gut, if Target re-sold those leases back to the Hudson Bay Company, and they re-launched Zellers (or a new name)....without renovating the currently open Target locations.
The target i went to had some serious stocking issues when it first opened up but they corrected that pretty fast and for the most part the deals have been a hell of a lot better then walmarts.
Don't know which Targets you went to, but I'd never say their prices were on par or cheaper than walmart's. On, like, anything. Except maybe some good sales, which were, sadly, few and far between. Their merchandise was significantly nicer looking though, even if it was only of slightly better manufacturing quality. In the end, I'd say their biggest mistake was trying to replace zellers with... well... zellers. I saw a lot of the same mistakes repeated, with a larger marketing budget. Maybe without the novelty of being a chain we didn't have in Canada, I just wasn't able to justify making more purchases there, I dunno.
My Targets suffered from the chronic lack of stock all their short lives. I will miss what they should have been, but not what they were. The only comfort in all this is that the CEOs who left surely got giant golden parachutes and every other exec responsible for this multi-billion dollar failure will surely get promotions, raises, and huge bonuses for it.
