Target employees in tears as “unruly mob” demands better deals

“Attention, bargain-hunters: The circle on our shirts is not a bulls-eye. Please direct your frustrations elsewhere.”

If that announcement could play regularly at 133 Target stores across Canada, thousands of employees might be happy. Or at least, less unhappy.

Already facing the loss of their jobs as the U.S.-based retailer abandons its ill-starred northern expansion, staff now must deal with the umbrage of shoppers disappointed by a lack of deals as a court-appointed liquidator begins selling off Target’s scant stock.

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“It’s just the lack of respect, and the confrontations,” says Bill Cox, 28, a stock worker at a Target that opened just last year on St. Laurent Boulevard in Ottawa.

Cox says nasty exchanges with the “unruly mob” that pushed in Thursday to seek savings left coworkers in tears or suffering anxiety attacks.

Some customers who fill a cart with items and then learn that they won’t save much  “just dump the cart wherever they are in the store, make a few lewd, hurtful comments as toward their disgust, and walk out,” he wrote in a letter to the Citizen.

While retail employers everywhere wish they could remind customers that it’s the boss, not them, who sets prices, these staff are still further removed. Target’s liquidator is determining price cuts as the chain moves toward a mid-May closing.

For Robin Ritchie, associate professor of marketing at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, this week’s complaints are just the latest chapter of Target’s Canadian fiasco. Loved by cross-border shoppers for the quality and prices of goods in its U.S. stores, the chain couldn’t deliver the same experience when it took over the leases of Zellers stores in Canada — and seemed caught unaware by the disappointment this caused.

Probably its biggest blunder, however, was failing to establish a supply chain that could keep shelves stocked, Ritchie said Friday. And now come the bad feelings over the pricing.

“In a sense you can’t blame Target for it — and yet in some sense it fulfils the narrative so well — that Target can’t even figure out how to do a liquidation well.”

Cox and his St. Laurent colleagues aren’t the only Target staff getting a rough time. An anonymous employee  pleaded on a reddit.com forum for customers to show respect. And Cox says Target staff he knows in his hometown of Windsor, Ont., report similar poor treatment.

Robin Ritchie’s message to the employees? Customers at going-out-of-business sales have a different attitude.

“When we go to a Target store, when a liquidation is on, it’s not because we need something,” he says. “It’s because we expect a deal, we expect potentially to have to fight for that deal, and it’s a very different mindset that we go into the store with.”

Ottawa Citizen