Those “small format” stores usually had zero staffed checkers and only self checkout.
Could it be mismanagement that’s to blame? No, let’s blame the poors.
“Corporate executives are all worthless liars. News at 11.”
We Americans depend on companies like Target to sell us groceries. They take our money and sequester it for the desires of their shareholders, out-compete local businesses, and often pay their staff too little to live with dignity in our communities. And yet we depend on them and reward them by shopping at their stores.
Even this isn’t enough for them. They would rather denigrate the communities they serve than admit they are simply closing less profitable stores. Why? Simply PR. It’s not just Target, Walmart has done this exact thing too.
They keep installing self checkouts and pretending it’s everyone else’s fault when shrink goes up. (I have nothing personal against self checkouts, before anything writes me a long response).
Corporations act as psychopaths and expect us to respect them, to respect the social contract between us. They ignore this same social contract when it suits them.
Obligatory fuck Target on virtue of being another shitty megacorp but two different points are being disingenuously conflated into one in this article.
Yes, it’s probably true that Target keeps stores open in higher-crime areas and yes, it’s probably also true that Target has blamed the closure of certain stores on theft in comparatively less-criminal areas, but those two facts don’t conflict with each other and are really only tangently related.
The whole retail industry was lying, not just Target.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shoplifting-retail-crime-theft-retraction.html
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/07/retail-theft-losses-inventory-nrf
Yep, “Organized Retail Crime” is a straight-up moral panic. As are most of these modern crime stories about how everything is getting more dangerous and blah blah blah. It’s just conservatives and capitalists lying to achieve conservative and capitalist goals.
The real objective here, as far as retailers are concerned, is to force communities to spend more of their limited policing budget on providing security services for their stores so that they don’t have to. And, of course, to have a convenient excuse to close down a poorly-performing store without as much of a PR headache from the community left behind.
Shop local. These national chains exist to funnel money out of communities. That’s their purpose. That’s the only reason they exist. And if your city council doesn’t make it just as easy for a local to open a business as a megacorp, hold your city council to task.
Agree. While it’s on a lower crime area, it’s also possible that sales were also lower at those stores, so crime took a larger chunk of revenue. Or a million other things. Correlation does not equal causation.
When I heard Target was closing a couple stores here in Seattle because of theft, I assumed it was the one downtown. When I read that it was the one in Ballard, I immediately knew the reasoning was bullshit. Nobody went to the one in Ballard. That is also not a high crime area (there is an upscale grocery store right across the street that has no theft issues). I knew they were just jumping on the theft excuse that has been debunked.
Last quote from the landlord is gold.
Because if you blame it on the management you’ll piss of the shareholders
steal from your local target
Be aware that Target has a sophisticated anti-shoplifting system with literal forensic labs in Minneapolis and Las Vegas. Stealing is possible, but much more difficult than most stores.
Remember, always know your mark.
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That’s just not true.
What is true is trolling is done by insecure pseudo intellectuals who think they’re smarter than everyone, but are too afraid to intellectually compete on a topic
Democratically run cities is kind of a redundant sentence.
