Some of his former employees dismiss him as just a media-friendly face, but others describe him as whip-smart, detail oriented and incredibly dedicated to Target. His tour of the first store was breathlessly covered by media, and consumer anticipation was running high. News crews were ready to snag customers as they left and cajole them into showing off their purchases.
The first items bought at Target Canada? Problems multiplied, and the public mood continued to turn against Target. Consumers soured on the brand when confronted with empty shelves—the exact scenario some senior employees warned of earlier in the year. Target Canada had ordered way more stock than it could actually sell. When the buying team was preparing for store openings, it instead relied on wildly optimistic projections developed at U.
According to someone with knowledge of the forecasting process in Minneapolis, the company treated Canadian locations the same way they did operational stores in the U.
Even if the stores were in out-of-the-way spots—and some of the locations in the Zellers portfolio certainly were—the company assumed the strength of the Target brand would lure customers. There was another element at play, too. In Canada, some buyers also relied on vendors for guidance, but vendors fell under the Target spell like everyone else. In consequence, Target ordered too much product that first year.
It all hit the distribution centres at the same time, creating a severe bottleneck. The depots were hampered by other factors, caused by lingering data problems and the learning curve associated with the new systems. Sometimes, the issues concerned dimensions and quantities. An employee at headquarters might have ordered 1, toothbrushes and mistakenly entered into SAP that the shipment would arrive in a case pack containing 10 boxes of toothbrushes each.
But the shipment might actually be configured differently—four larger boxes of toothbrushes, for example. Warehouse workers got so desperate to move shipments they would sometimes slice open a crate that was supposed to contain, say, a dozen boxes of paper towels but only had 10, stuff in two more boxes, tape it shut and send it to a store that way. Tractor-trailers sat idling in the yards, waiting to be unloaded.
The situation got so bad that Target scrambled to rent a handful of storage facilities to accommodate all of the inventory flooding in. The process of determining which goods to send to these rented facilities was haphazard, making it difficult to track things down later.
Another recalls feeling shocked when visiting the rental warehouse in Vancouver. American expats, accustomed to the efficiency of the U. The issues at the distribution centres caused havoc downstream.
Stores might end up with an abundance of some products and a dearth of others. Like many other parts of retail, replenishment is an exacting science that can go haywire without correct data. At Target Canada, the technology relied on having the exact dimensions of every product and every shelf in order to calculate whether employees need to pull more products to fill an empty rack.
The problem became immediately apparent when Target opened its first three test stores. Fisher made the call to shut off the system and replenish manually. That meant store employees had to literally walk the floor and check each shelf—a laborious, error-laden process.
To add even more headaches, the point-of-sale system was malfunctioning. The self-checkouts gave incorrect change. The cash terminals took unusually long to boot up and sometimes froze. Sometimes a transaction would appear to complete, and the customer would leave the store—but the payment never actually went through.
Progress was maddeningly slow. In , a Retalix team flew to Toronto to see first-hand what Target was dealing with. Retalix was purchased in by NCR Corp. Former employees suggest that Retalix sold itself on its omnichannel capabilities, meaning it would be able to process payments on mobile devices.
Time may have been another factor. Meanwhile, after a few rounds of store openings, the status update meetings Fisher held at headquarters had turned darkly comic. After the regular rundown of crippling operational problems, the president still ended each gathering with a pep talk of sorts, reiterating how proud he was of the team and all they had accomplished. Despite his stubborn optimism, those meetings had grown more tense too.
Everyone knew the launch was a disaster and the company had to stop opening stores so it could fix its operational problems, but no one actually said so.
The Canadian expansion was ultimately driven by Minneapolis, and because of the real estate deal hatched by CEO Gregg Steinhafel, the company was committed to opening these stores. Because of the leases, it had to move forward. The entire organization started to crack under the pressure. Stress caused another former employee to crack a tooth from grinding his teeth during sleep.
It took a toll on personal lives as well. I was a shell. Tony Fisher felt it too. Former employees say his background—primarily in merchandising—was ill-suited to helping him deal with the severe operational and technological problems Target Canada faced. But he and some of his leadership team became less visible as problems mounted. As the situation worsened, he was frequently in meetings, participating in conference calls, visiting stores or flying to Minneapolis.
Fisher declined to comment. The company attributed the shortfall to growing pains, expansion costs and—because of all that excess inventory sitting in warehouses—significant markdowns.
It was his last as Target CEO. A month prior, Target had disclosed a massive security breach in which hackers stole the personal information of 70 million customers in the U.
Fisher—hand-picked by Steinhafel—left the company two weeks later. By the end, Fisher was practically a ghost. He was just done. It was Mark Schindele who took over as head of Target Canada. He was a year company veteran and previously served as a senior vice-president of merchandising operations in Minneapolis. At one point, Target Canada had printed a weekly flyer in which nearly every single item featured on the front cover was out of stock, a situation that would have been unheard of in Minneapolis.
A new crop of senior leaders arrived from U. HQ with Schindele, replacing some of the exhausted execs who handled the launch. The biggest difference between the two groups was attitude: The new team had energy. Decisions were made faster as well.
Under Fisher, the company had trouble making tough calls. Discussions dragged on for months. The new leadership, however, quickly implemented a plan to rent more space.
Schindele brought increased focus to the company too. Employees at all points along the supply chain were to ensure those items made it to stores and stayed in stock.
Even so, the company planned to reduce its emphasis on groceries. Target used groceries as a traffic driver in the U. A massive product revamp was planned for the fall. Discussion about marketing and when it was appropriate to invite the consumer back into the stores after making a terrible first impression intensified. Those conversations started when Fisher was still in place. Fisher was not in favour of the idea, according to two former employees.
Regardless, the idea was only hatched very shortly before Fisher left the company. In June , however, Target Canada released its apology on YouTube, which featured employees and executives reflecting on the challenges of the first year and confessing to their sins. By that time, the stores were indeed functioning better. For one thing, Target had a year of sales history from Canada.
A man shops for back to school supplies in a shop in Toronto, Thursday, Aug. However, the agency said its preliminary estimate for July, which will be revised, suggests retail sales fell 1.
TD Bank economist Ksenia Bushmeneva said retail sales continue to ebb and flow with the tightening and easing of the public health restrictions. That said, improvement in spending on high-touch services, in addition to robust retail expenditure, bodes well for GDP growth in the third quarter. For June, retail sales increased in eight of the 11 subsectors as clothing and clothing accessories stores led the way with a gain of Sales at general merchandise stores rose 7.
Sales at food and beverage stores fell 2. Sales at building material and garden equipment and supplies dealers fell 3.
Core retail sales - which exclude gasoline stations and motor vehicle and parts dealers - rose 4. Regionally, sales were up in six provinces in June, with Ontario gaining 9. Search Search CP24 X. Statistics Canada says retail sales gained 4. For most of the variables reported, information on cumulative changes in the data both prior and subsequent to the end of is also presented by indexing the level estimates to December , as depicted in the accompanying charts.
Monthly average retail prices for selected products, by province. Prices are presented for the current month and the previous four months. Prices are based on transaction data from Canadian retailers, and are presented in Canadian current dollars.
Historical releases of retail trade sales, available for all members under release and adjustment dimensions, for Canada, provinces and territories, available on a monthly basis in dollars x 1, Historical real-time releases of retail sales, price, and volume, available for all members under North American Industry Classification System NAICS dimension, for Canada, available on a monthly basis, seasonally adjusted, in dollars x 1,, Data is seasonally adjusted and available on a monthly basis in dollars x 1,, Historical releases of wholesale trade sales, available for all members under release and adjustment dimensions, for Canada, provinces and territories, available on a monthly basis in dollars x 1, Historical releases of wholesale trade inventories, available for all members under release, adjustments and North American Industry Classification System NAICS dimensions, available on a monthly basis, for Canada, in dollars x 1, Initially, retail trade was one of the hardest hit by public health restrictions, but in recent months, retail business sentiment has improved significantly.
This paper presents a portrait of the pandemic's impact on businesses in retail trade and the expectations of these businesses moving forward. It involves an examination of the data produced by the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions. The WSPI measures the monthly and the quarterly changes in the price of wholesale services in Canada. The index is an indicator of economic activity in the wholesales services sector, as well as a tool that can be utilized by the industry for cost monitoring, contract assessment and benchmark comparisons.
This infographic features alcohol sales in Canada for the fiscal year. It gives a breakdown of standard alcoholic drinks sold per week, sales by type of beverage, and the share of domestic vs. Using a custom tabulation of data from the Monthly Retail Trade Survey, this infographic provides a graphical analysis of retail e-commerce vs.
The study analyzes the movements of RSPI during pandemic by subsectors, including clothing stores, grocery stores, and electronic stores, etc.
It also compares different responses of retail sectors during pandemic and during recession. Based on the in-depth analysis, the article also provides an outlook of the price index trend for the year Statistics Canada's annual retail trade surveys are undergoing changes.
Two activities underlie these changes. The re-design of our annual retail trade questionnaires is one. These activities will have significant impacts on the output of the annual surveys.
This paper has two goals. The first is to inform retail store data users, industry analysts, trade associations and other stakeholders about these changes. The second is to consult with stakeholders on possible data outputs resulting from the changes. The paper is organized into five parts. Following the introduction, Part II describes the outputs from the current surveys and compares and contrasts the current outputs with the new.
In Part IV, the benefits resulting from the above changes are outlined. The final part Part V seeks comments or suggestions from data users, retail trade associations and industry specialists on the release of data products as a result of the changes to the surveys.
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