Originally published at: Target is in fact opening nine new stores in New York City and many more nationwide | Boing Boing
…
4 Likes
And just this morning in The Seattle Times, we see:
Target to close 2 Seattle stores, citing safety concerns
Target will close nine stores in major U.S. cities including two in Seattle because of crime and safety concerns, the company said Tuesday.
…
“Theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests, and contributing to unsustainable business performance,” Target said in a statement Tuesday.
[dubious frowny face emoji]
6 Likes
9 Likes
This has been true with mainstream media for years now. They’re not doing any actual journalism. They’re mostly just reading press releases. And their idea of “fair and balanced” reporting is to read press releases from both sides.
6 Likes
Weird how if you cut down on staff and replace checkout clerks with self service machines theft is a bigger issue. (Obviously they have made a calculation that a certain amount won’t hurt their profits or they would add more staff)
2 Likes
Shouldn’t they be worried about that organized retail theft gang because cities are scary/crime wave/whatever the narrative is now that they literally also put out this morning?
Or are they not opening in “those” cities.
2 Likes
Here’s my on-the-ground observations in Portland, where they are closing three stores.
Two out of the three are less than five years old and are waaaay undersized. Both seemed opportunistic to me in that they adapted existing buildings.
The third one is downtown but not near any of the residentially-dense parts.
So, yeah, simple bad management is my guess. Which is sad for me, because I inherited some stock in Target from my Minneapolis parents.
2 Likes
These must be Schrödinger’s Stores - simultaneously closing and opening in the same cities.
They’re mostly relocating some stores, but the corporate overlords at the big media companies seem to have some sort of an agenda. What end is served by inflating the frequency of retail property crime is not clear to me. Do they want Fraudster in Chief back in the Oval Office? Are they terrified of police departments getting defunded? 
4 Likes
I mean there’s definitely a larger narrative of “crime is up”, “cities are dangerous”, “nobody wants to work”, “everything is too expensive because of inflation”, “border crisis”, etc. going on so yeah probably all of the above combined with the usual not wanting to get looked at for wage theft, terrible practices in the supply chain, fear of unions asking for fair working conditions (or even existing, really), etc.
Target has always gotten a pass because they’re not Walmart and now a bigger pass because they’re also not Amazon. That doesn’t make them the good guys though.
1 Like
But is it Target pushing these narratives or is Universal and Comcast? Since other chain stores are also moving out of high-rent, low-residential areas, I’m not convinced Target, specifically, is pushing any narrative.
Opening stores?! So if the laws of retail science are in equulirbium, this must be because people are just…bringing products into the store and them putting on the shelves?
1 Like
Fair. I think it’s a mix of taking advantage of said rhetoric and the kinds of people who pay a lot of money to invest in media companies are also paying a lot of money to invest in retail stores as well.
Not going full conspiracy here so much as to say there’s probably a small but powerful overlap of folks making money off all this.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
