Target began as a department store's discount experiment in suburban Minnesota
In May 1962 the Minneapolis department store Dayton's opened a cut-price spinoff in Roseville, a suburb of St. Paul, named after the centre of a shooting target. By the end of that year there were four. The discount offshoot eventually outgrew its parent so completely that the whole company took its name in 2000.
John Geisse and Douglas Dayton launched the chain, and its first four stores all stood in Minnesota: Roseville, Crystal, Duluth and St. Louis Park. The idea was upscale, trendy goods at low prices. Dayton-Hudson Corporation announced in January 2000 that it would rename itself Target Corporation. The mascot is Bullseye, a white bull terrier, and despite the matching name and logo, the American firm has never had any link to Target Australia. More surprisingly, the company runs two criminal forensics laboratories.
Store formats kept multiplying. The first Target Greatland opened in Apple Valley, Minnesota, in September 1990, about half again as big as a regular store, with more checkouts, wider aisles and a food court. The first SuperTarget, adding a full grocery department, followed in Omaha in 1995. Former chief executive Gregg Steinhafel contrasted it with Walmart, which he described as a grocer that happens to sell general merchandise, treating Target's own food push as a high-impact, low-cost side project. An early 2000s experiment placing E-Trade trading stations in dozens of stores was abandoned by June 2003 as unprofitable.
Then the stores began shrinking. CityTarget and TargetExpress outlets opened from 2012 in dense cities and college towns, selling smaller packages for shoppers riding public transport, and in 2015 all were simply renamed Target. Nearly every opening planned through 2019 was a small format aimed at millennials.
In 2015 Target sold its pharmacies and clinics to CVS Health for around $1.9 billion. Its sourcing arm, founded in 1916 as the Associated Merchandising Corporation and bought in 1998, inspects factories worldwide for quality and labour rights.
Source: Target Corporation
