Sears bankruptcy

TARGET!!!

[red mist descends]

Target bought out Zellers, a decent discount chain in Canada, and completely, utterly fucked it up. Fucked it up as in they forgot Canada uses metric, so when inventory arrived it wouldn’t fit on the store shelves, because the box sizes were in American/Imperial. Fucked it up as in they forgot said inventory would have to cross an international border to get here, and hadn’t made the arrangements necessary to expedite the customs clearings of such large shipments.

They got rid of entire Zellers departments which were popular here but not found in Target stores, and replaced them with Target stuff people don’t buy as much here.

The articles detailing the downfall tended to go for business-speak, but all the major identified problems boiled down to: they didn’t realise Canada is not the US.

So customers wandered through near-empty stores that were well-stocked under the Zellers banner, wondering why Target had such a great reputation in the States.

Over a thousand people lost their jobs over that one.

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At the risk of offending some people…

My opinion is Target is WalMart for people who won’t be seen at Walmart.

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That’s… Generally not how random selection works.

If you have a population of one million people, and a hundred thousand of them are assholes, then if you select five hundred thousand of them randomly, it’s likely that you’ll select approximately 50,000 assholes.

In fact, that’s how polling works. With high enough numbers, the chance that a randomly-chosen sample of the population will not be representative of the whole approaches zero.

Now, it’s possible that you’ll end up with 51,336 assholes in your Thanos sample, and slightly reduce the ratio of assholes to nice people. But it’s also possible that you’ll select only 48,664, and slightly increase that same ratio. Either way, the law of averages (or is it the law of large numbers?) says that you’re not going to stray far from you initial ratio.

And with a sample of billions, with a truly random selection? I’d be surprised if the ratio shifted so much as a hundredth of a percentage point.

Edit: fixed initial ratio; I wanted a ten-to-one ratio to start, but somehow ended up with one-hundred-to-one.

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I don’t buy Target clothes anymore because even though the styles are cute, they don’t last through washings. Every time I’m at Target I have to mantra, “resist the cute, cheap clothes!”

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I once read an article about Troy-Bilt, a manufacturer of garden machines like edgers and trench diggers, who were negotiations to make models for Walmart. They were told they had to make them to sell at ridiculously low prices. They refused because they didn’t want to damage their reputation by making cheap junk.

I don’t know if they’ve changed their minds, or got bought out or what. But this is one thing that’s wrong with the US (and maybe the rest of the world). Cheap products, use once, throw away, so people don’t have to save up or make choices anymore. They can buy anything and everything, so long as they don’t mind it breaking the second time they use it.

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I had a friend who owned the company that made Galileo thermometers. You know, these:

These started out as a high end catalog item. He manufactured them in Germany. But they got into a deal with Walmart, which forced them to go into China for manufacturing - which he HATED. I knew him through a writing class, and he wrote a really disturbing story based on his experiences with that.

But, as he said, very few companies can cut you a check for a million dollars.

Later he got out of that business and into growlers, which was a great business as it was patented.

He was a very wealthy man; super cool, too. I really miss him. He committed suicide a few years ago. So sad as he had it all, a wife he adored, and who adored him, a gorgeous home, a good business, stepkid that also was in a good place with him. I had moved away from Wilmington at that point and have no idea what was going on. I know he’d gotten into day trading, but I suspect it had nothing to do with money or circumstances and just a depressive nature he couldn’t fight.

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I once took a writing class with a businessman who was from China. He wanted to write a how-to guide for North Americans dealing with Chinese businesses for the first time. He’d seen things from both sides, and realised North Americans (often, not always) didn’t know the ins and outs of Chinese business.

I wish I’d taken better note of his contact info. I’d love to read his book.

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This is an interesting book that tackles one type of business dealings in China.

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The Target Canada thing for me was interesting because a) I spent a lot of time in Canada and I thought Zellers was charmingly, quaintly Canadian even if I didn’t really like most of the merchandise, and b) in the Buffalo area, at most of the Target stores you are guaranteed to see a lot of Ontario license plates in the parking lots any day of the week - on weekends, one location in particular is easily 50%+ Ontario plates.

Of course, they’re there in part simply because stuff is cheaper in the US, but before the Target Canada episode I heard from several Canadians - coincidentally, women my age who wear larger clothing sizes - that they were desperate for Target to come to Canada because they have nice-looking clothes in larger sizes at low prices which is or was much harder to find in Canada than in the US.

They do other things well too that no other discount store really does, like legitimately-nice-looking home goods (a huge step above Wal-Mart, @Wisconsin_Platt). The actual durability-quality of the Target-branded items is not typically much better than other discount stores (as @ChickieD notes re:the clothes not surviving the washer), but the design quality is.

By the way, I’m not a Target evangelist. I don’t buy clothes from there myself (the fit is bad for me). I buy toiletries and some food there because it’s convenient, and my girlfriend and I buy some of the nicer home goods but very selectively (stuff that’s essentially disposable or can get easily ruined, like towels, but that we still want to look nice).

(I am curious which entire Zellers departments were eliminated - though I went occasionally I was never a regular Zellers-goer)

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Even though I don’t cross-border shop much, I was one of those people.

And then the merchandise never showed up, in any size. Plus sizes were especially noticed by their absence. It wasn’t unusual to discover the only item left of a given kind was the one in the display.

A lot of people noticed the Zellers craft section going away. I’m not sure the pull that had would have shown up on a spreadsheet. The shopping logic was something like, “oh yeah, I promised Cousin Louis that I’d make him a new tuque for his birthday. Better grab some yarn. Now since I’m in here, Jenny needs new underwear and hey! Toothpaste is on sale!”

That’s the only department I can think of now that got removed outright. Others changed sizes dramatically, but that may also have had to do with the spotty inventory.

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What I’d really love to see is a Canadian-born equivalent to Target. I bet it’d be really neat. I’d make a point to go there and buy something quirky whenever I go back to Buffalo to visit.

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Check out this thread from Louis Hyman, who is a historian of consumption:

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I saw that, forgot to post, then lost it. So thank you! (Is good thread).

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I think you’re right and I was wrong. I was thinking of the counter-intuitive nature of monty hall and sometimes monte carlo simulations. I must’ve pictured it in my head with an extra division or a missing sum. It’s been a long week.

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