Growth plan sets sites on bringing stores to urban centers.
Target has established a growth plan for the new few years that includes a focus on making its stores more accessible to city dwellers. As part of the company’s overall commitment to sustainability, community, and smart development, it has committed to a blueprint that allows them to create buildings that “use space efficiently, improve connectivity for guests and team members, and enhance local communities.” That includes revitalizing business districts and re-working previously developed sites and retail spaces.
And, Target asserts on its website, “As we build more stores, especially in urban areas, we’ll continue to focus on responsible growth – where guests live and work, and near mass transit.”
In 2012 the company introduced CityTarget, a small-format store that had more limited selections, and by the start of 2015 there were eight CityTargets nationwide.
In August, Target announced that they were doing away with the CityTarget name, and rebranding every store to simply “Target,” according to Fortune. Although the company plans 11 new stores in 2016 and four in 2017, it is moving away from its larger suburban-sized stores, with only one such store of 122,000 square feet planned in Allentown, PA. A 45,000 square foot store in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood is also in the works, but the rest of the new stores will be less than 40,000 square feet in area.
One reason for this move is that the latest United States Census found that the urban population has increased by 12.1 percent between 2000 and 2010, outpacing the overall growth rate of 9.7 percent. That means that cities are being revitalized, driving a new demand for retail spaces in their inner cores. Retailers are responding to these changes by reversing their tendencies to invest heavily in suburban areas.
“The suburbs are basically saturated with retailers,” Patrick L. Phillips, chief executive of the research nonprofit Urban Land Institute, told the New York Times. “But it’s easy to develop stores in the suburbs, and hard to develop stores in cities.”
Consulting firm Kantar Retail’s data found that 13 percent of Target shoppers are city dwellers and that the average urban Target shopper goes to a Target 2.3 times a month, compared to 1.8 times for a suburbanite, according to Fortune. This supports Target’s move to develop urban stores. “We know our (urban) guests shop our stores,” said Scott Nelson, senior vice president of property development. “They just have to travel a lot further to get there.”
“U.S. consumers are moving back to cities. We have to make sure we have a footprint in that environment,” Target CEO Brian Cornell told Fortune. “If we have an opportunity and we find the right footprint and the right format, we’re going to follow the consumer.”
