Ask Lemmy

That Target's entry into the Canadian market was designed to fail from the start so that Walmart could swoop in, take over the entire logistics chain and ensure people get to keep their jobs to quell the concerns about Walmart becoming a monopoly in Canada.

Target failed so spectacularly that from my perspective on the inside it had to be by design. When the stores first ooened there was no stock available because we were shipping goods on trailers with no skids, packed floor to ceiling at random then expecting some poor souls in the back rooms of Target stores everywhere (likely with no previous logistics experience) to unload, organize the product into categories on skids and then take them out to the aisles to be put on shelves. We should have been building skids in the warehouses for months until demand settled and could be fulfilled by maximizing trailer efficiency with floor to ceiling loads.

There were an unbelievable amount of blatant inefficiencies and Inventory Control was deliberately understaffed so we ended up with a warehouse with thousands of open rack slots but the system thought the warehouse was full. Multiple layers of this kind of shit were going on and every time we voiced concern about it, management told us to just keep our heads down.

I swear some execs with nice golden parachutes conspired to ensure Target failed so Walmart could swoop in and save the day, breaking through the public concern about monopolization.