$7 Billion Disaster - Why Target Failed in Canada 

You could be watching these videos early, ad-free, and with entire exclusives like my series "China, Actually". This link will reduce the price to just $2.50/month when you sign up for the annual plan: go.nebula.tv/polymatter

Canadian here. Another factor (for me anyway) was that Target Canada wasn't selling Target USA level merchandise. I was excited when Target moved north of the border because I liked a lot of Target brand merchandise and the stores seemed slightly more upmarket than Walmart. Target Canada however was full of Dollar Store/Army&Navy type junk, but at higher prices. It was pointless to shop there.

What upset me about Target as a Canadian is despite seeing all the obvious signs that Target botched launch and wasn't a real Target experience. The corporate statement was "Canada wasn't ready for Target"

My girlfriend worked at a Canadian Target, she was able to be on the phone with me for more than half her shift because of how empty the store was, in terms of both customers and inventory… She would finish all of her actual work in the first hour or two, then just wander around the deserted store like it was a ghost town, with me on the other end of the call, telling me about how much work there wasn’t. 🎯

Canadian in Quebec here - Here Target seemed to be completely uninterested in appealing to us. For every Target there was a Walmart almost just across the corner, so not only did they have nothing, they offered nothing that would appeal to the local population in terms of goods, services or even looks. Stores looked like the lights were dimmed 24/7 like some back alley shop

Target US is patronized by many serious Canadian shoppers so they knew the "real thing" and what opened in Canada was not even close. In the beginning there were some quality Canadian brands sold but they went quickly and never came back. The grocery section was run by a Canadian chain which probably expected one stop shopping convenience to mitigate their higher prices. The main exercise seemed to involve cashiers constantly pushing their credit card.

As other Canadians have said, part of the issue was also the quality. The products sold by Target in Canada were comparable to dollar stores goods for the most part, and a lot of the clothing was just really poor quality

I remember standing outside the local Canadian Target on Black Friday, waiting for the doors to open at 7:00 AM. At 6:45 AM, the manager came out and asked who was there for the door crasher TV promo. Everyone raised their hands. The poor man had to tell us he only had two in stock. Not two pallets, two TVs. Target closed 4 months later.

As an Australian who has shopped in Target many times my whole life, I am shocked to know that Target only exists in the US. Now I wonder what I’ve been shopping at

Target was so horribly overpriced on the products they did have on the shelves, even at liquidation they were asking too much. Pricing at Zellers was comparable to Walmart, so unsurprising the demographic that shopped at Zellers didn't want to shop at Target.

Canadian here. One thing missed was how target decided to fire all the previous Zelelrs employee's and train everyone new. I knew a woman who worked at Zellars for 15 years and she was let go. If they had retained the staff at these locations, I would imagine there would have been less mistakes with the ERP, and many other rushed problems.

Canadian here from Ottawa, Ontario. I remember the huge fanfare when Target opened and subsequently leaving a few years later. The stores had empty shelves and prices that were not what we were expecting when they opened. What a huge embarrassment for the company on how not to expand into another country. It was an unmitigated disaster.

My favourite part of the entire Target debacle is that despite Zellers everywhere being converted into Targets, a very small number of remaining Zellers stores STILL managed to outlast all 133 Targets for a short while.

I didn't know Canada is overseas from the USA, thanks for keeping me informed PolyMatter!

As a Canadian living in a small city in Québec, a Target opened in a Zeller store, everyone was happy because Walmart was finally going to have some competition. it was actually stocked pretty well, the store had been renovated quickly from the old Zeller store. But only a couple weeks later, seeing that Target was just a more expansive Walmart, no one went there anymore, it sat empty for two years until it finally closed, no one was sad. It was a war between two American stores no one identifies with, we just went with the best deals, it was never Target.

As a process engineer who has worked through 2 separate SAP cutovers at 2 companies, I have to admit, I died laughing and understand exactly why the whole venture failed.

As a Canadian when I went to business school this legit was an assignment I had to do. A perfect textbook example on what NOT to do. There are a number of other reasons why it failed. 1 they failed to do their research and treated us Canadians as Americans. 2 in Canada we don't have that "Bougie" mindset that Americans have, We ALL shop in Walmart no matter our economic differences.

My girlfriend interned at Target HQ as a programmer in 2017, and they actually taught her all about this blunder and what they learned from it. By the time she was there, they were doing 70% of their software in house as opposed to 30% during this time period, directly as a result of this failure. She says the video offers a more big-picture look than what she learned, but on the software side, it’s accurate.

I did a paper on this. Target took the cheapest and quickest route to expand into Canada. This was a decision made at the executive level with no deep thought or time put into it. "Let's take these failed locations and turn them into Targets. Yeah, that won't backfire at all."

I remember when the Targets first came to Canada, in fact I think I could point out the exact store I visited on the map you showed.... most people I knew sorta just saw target as a weird Winners/Homesense/Walmart hybrid that didn't really have the greatest deals or was too similar to other options that were already readily available and well known. Add on things not being in stock and it felt like walking into half empty warehousey Amazon irl shop filled with junk you didn't really need for prices that weren't too exciting. And that was just it.

One of my friends was a Manager at a Canadian Target. He mentioned that their planograms were very strict. He had a 100 blue pillows in backstock but only space for 10 in the plan. The plan said another colour was supposed to be beside the blue ones, but he didn’t have that colour so that shelf had to be empty. He could have made the shelves as least look better but that wasn’t permitted.

As a European I was really surprised learning that most Walmart's exist outside the US

Your comment about who used the software is spot on. I worked for a company for 10 years, who, during that time had 3, well technically 4 project management pieces of software. The first year I started they were running 2, in parallel, because some C-suite Exec’s wouldn’t give up the old software. So employees had to enter info on 2 different systems. Further, and alluding to your comments, managers didn’t have to use the software as they had their own way of reporting projects to upper management. When I left, the latest project management software was very cumbersome to use, but upper management liked the pretty reports. smh

We had a Target come to my home town and, while I liked it, I never shopped there much because they had so many items/brands that I was unfamiliar with and was unwilling to risk my limited cash on. But I was learning and getting used to the products and then they disappeared. One of my absolute favourite things that kept me coming back and would have made me a permanent customer was that there was no Muzak. It was quiet. I wasn’t being bombarded with annoying music while shopping. Especially at Christmas. It was bliss.

As an enterprise data architect.. I feel this story profoundly.

The one thing that everyone here in Canada remembers about Target is that the shelves were always empty. You can talk about the high prices, lacking website, and poor branding all you want but at the end of the day what did Target Canada in was that there wasn't anything to buy even if Canadian shoppers wanted to give Target their money. Like what did they expect? Canadian shoppers would just donate their money to Target?

As a kid, I was super disappointed when Zellers closed down. Given how Walmart was a little more out of the way to visit, Zellers was an easy place to go when I wanted to buy whatever new toys were advertised on YTV. When Target came around, I was stoked cuz I was hoping it could be like when I was a kid, all over again. Imagine my utterly crushed hopes when they flopped so hard.

It is truly amazing how they didn't simply write a translation layer just below presentation that converted price, language and measurement units for the user. Anyone who has ever worked with enterprise software knows how long it takes to shake the bugs out.

One thing that was big news when Target launched in Canada was the lack of Target branded products. Target was having trouble importing it's own brands to Canada, and so on Day 1, everyone who went to Target left disappointed because they were selling the same products available in other stores. Canadians shop in America because America has different products not available here. It's not cheaper or better.

A Target bigwig gave the 'big revelation' that Canadian shoppers tend to use varied stores, not stay loyal to one retailer. That info should have been learned in Feasibility Study #1!

I remember Target. It was essentially a Walmart and SuperStore. Both of which were a 5 minute drive away. There is such a thing as too many big box stores. The Target was split into 3 separate stores, all of which are still thriving.

I worked at target canada from before the grand opening up until we liquidated all the stores and this was very intriguing to watch. This is all true, I'll never forget the day when news broke that we were closing down and all of us heard the news on TV before the actual stores did. Had a emergency meeting moments later it was surreal. Fun times in retrospect I've never experienced that before.

One thing that never gets mentioned on videos about the failure of Target Canada is that they also lacked a proper website. I remember when they launched here in Canada and I wanted to see if they sold something that I was looking for that Walmart didn't have, so I decided to check their website, only to find out that it was just a PDF image of their weekly flyer... No way to navigate, no way to see store stock, no way to search for items they sold, nothing. Only of static image of their flyer of the week...

I honestly think with just a little investment Zellers had a better chance of partially recovering than Target's mess. Prices were lower and had a working ERP system, even if it may have been dated. From my perspective as a Canadian growing up when this happened, Target (in Canada), during it's brief presence, was just an overpriced trashy foreign store trying to muscle in with nothing worth buying that wasn't cheaper somewhere else. In contrast Zellers a few years earlier was well... not great, but on the list of somewhere I might get an occasional thing from.

Great explanation of the SAP system failure. There was also a little know issue of the firm rules Target had for product placement in the stores. Combined with the distribution problems we faced, this became a nightmare for the employees. Here are a couple - of many - examples. The Target floor plan had set spaces for each colour of towel in a wall of towels. When all the towels were in stock and placed, it was supposed to look like a rainbow. The issue was that they sent the stores an obscene amount of white towels, and maybe one or two of the towels in a couple of colours. Most people would think it logical to put all of the white towels out to fill those empty spots, but Target had strict (and enforced) rules on how items must be placed. This meant that customers saw and empty wall of shelves with one small line of white towels, and the few random other colours, while staff had to (often dangerously) crawl around backrooms filled to bursting with all of the products that couldn't be moved out to the floor because the designated spot was already full. Another good example of the full backroom/empty store was when a store received an entire truck of basketball nets. Literally the entire, very large truck was nothing but large basketball nets. On the floor, there was a designated spot to fit two of them. To make matters worse, in one particular store, that designated spot had a pillar going through it and only one of the nets could be placed... squeezed in behind the pillar so the only way you could get it out was to remove all of the products sitting beside it. Because they couldn't be placed anywhere else in the store, the backroom was packed with nets until we got special permission to ship them back. It didn't take long for the backrooms to become so completely filled with products that couldn't be placed that staff had to shuffle and squeeze around back there. It was intensely frustrating for staff to move from a dangerously full backroom space out to the empty floor where angry customers would be waiting to voice how upset they were with the staff for not having products out.

Hey. Hate to be "that guy," but, I just thought I'd let you know, that the footage used in the latter third of this upload (11:23), is NOT of a Target location. This is footage of a CVS (Consumer Value Store).

"...Walmart the face of America" McDonald's looks restless

As a former Target Canada employee on the Flow Team, this video was a lovely dose of schadenfreude.

This Was A Great Article!! Thank You.

Hi from Canada, I'm glad I found this channel and just subscribed. Great video, even the "overseas joke" 😆😆

I remember this situation vividly. I actually liked target, but it was incredibly disappointing to see the Zellers nearby change. They had a side section where you could get hot chocolate, smoothies and other drinks while hanging out and it was nice (specifically at the one I went to, not sure about all of them). After target failed it became a husk, which was incredibly sad to see.

I remember going to target when my daughter was first born, they also had these great deals on the Carters Onesies. I think I bought something random like bed sheets. I lived in Alberta Canada, at the time. It sure was not like the well stocked Targets in Southern California though. Also, hilariously, Zellers is trying to make a come-back.

The PowerPoint bit waa very funny, cool editing!

"It was the quickest expansion in company history" It was also the only expansion in company history lol

I remember when Target declared that it was opening in Canada. People I know and myself were fairly optimistic about having the chain open up. But when it eventually did, we were taken aback a bit by the price of products within and the surprisingly little variety in inventory. While the stores I went to never suffered (to my knowledge) from inventory not being restocked, there were just an awful lot of maternity items for a store of its size.

“To the strange and exotic lands of Ohio” lol!

I spent a lot of time in different targets across ontario as my dad was the card distributor for them. I actually have a few fond memories of that place, and I don’t quite remember seeing stock issues in the stores I was in. What I do remember however was how unnecessary the whole store was. It was in an old Zellers location which also happened to be directly across from a Walmart. They didn’t offer standout products or name brands, their food selection was freezer, canned or boxed, their card section consisted of 2 huge aisles of cards on both sides (this was quite excessive), their electronic section was exactly like Walmart minus the staff, there was just no good justifiable reason to shop there. All this considered, and their prices were always higher than Walmart. I’m not surprised this drove shoppers away from them. As beloved as Zellers was, Canadians were eager to get a taste of something new to fill its shoes, and Target underestimated how big Zellers shoes were to fill. What replaced many Canadians favourite bargain store with a home style diner was an arrogant, insulting, and overzealous store with an overpriced coffee shop. If you’re like most Canadians, you checked it out once and probably never returned. Trying to slide into the same spot Zellers held was not an accomplishable goal, yet they still tried. Now Zellers is coming back to life, and has a heartbeat. Rip Target Canada. We don’t want you back.

I grew up in Milton Ontario and I remember when they opened the Target store, I was quite excited but sad that my childhood store of Zellers was closing. I did not realize that we were one of the first stores. I remember going into Target and thinking, '*this* is what they thought would be a better replacement for Zellers?' Awesome video to contextualize my experience.

As an ERP Developer for a company that uses SAP, this was a fun video watch!!! I got all hyped when the PowerPoint segment started

I remember using SAP at my first job after graduating university. Was a nightmare to use and I was the only one at my company who could use it extensively. So happy my company ditched it after 7 months.

Target is also in Australia. Definitely not as large as Target is in the US and often not selling food too, but there is definitely many targets in Australia

Canadian here. Where I lived, we had a K-Mart just down the road. It was in a building, kind of mall like, but only 2 stores. An IGA and K-Mart. In between the 2 stores was a big corridor which would sometimes have smaller kiosks, but K-Mart was the highlight! I remember playing Nintendo in the electronics section when I was like 5-6 years old. I also remember the blue light sales. We also had Zellers, but it was father away. When I was old enough, I would bike to K-Mart to play super nintendo!

We have target in Australia. Saying it's only in the USA at the start made me question everything else in this

I lived in the US for a few years and was a frequent Target shopper. The biggest disappointment I had with the Canadian stores were the extremely high prices. The video claims prices were just 15% higher but it sure seemed a lot higher than that to me. I really loved Target in the US and shopped there frequently, but the Canadian stores prices just made the place a non starter for me. I’m always surprised watching these videos about the events I experienced myself first hand and how differently they are portrayed. Sure. There were a few empty shelves - but not many in my memory. News outlets would focus their cameras on these few empty shelves of course to make their stories more dramatic - but the crazy high prices were rarely mentioned. Very odd.

Quick correction: Australia also has Target, and it's integrated into the market quite well. So it's not only in the US.

That ppt segment was brilliant and hilarious 😂

When i was a kid in Canada, I went to a target during its opening week. Even as a ten year old, I noticed just how empty every aisle was and the lack of life in the store.

Interestingly, my local Zellers (in a western Montreal suburb) was in pretty rough shape. When Target came in they barely did anything to upgrade it, I mean they just changed the signage and that's about it... so inside this "new" Target was really an old dirty run down Zellers. "A fresh coat of paint" would be an exaggeration. Add this to the empty shelves and the store was dead on arrival. When Walmart took over, they shut it down for months and completely re-decorated and cleaned up the place and it's now a very successful store.

Canadians never stopped shopping at American Target. Not only did the Canadian version not have good prices, they also didn’t have the products that everybody likes to buy at the US target. So that was partially the issue along with the other factors that you’ve mentioned. Nobody wanted Target Canada, everybody wanted Target America to be more convenient.

I'm from Montreal and I did sometime window shopped at the downtown Target in Alexis Nihon. I don't remember empty shelves, but I do remember the lack of customers. It is now a Canadian Tire and it's one of my most visited stores. It's the nicest Canadian Tire and the store seems busy, much more so then when it was a Target.

That was by far the best PowerPoint presentation I’ve seen! I’m still laughing 😂😂😂!!!

The problem is Zellers had remodelled a few years prior. They had 60's style diners in them and had some decent products in them. If they had revamped and matched wallmarts electronics section I think they could have competed well. Target was just worse across the board. I used to go to Zellers, I walked through the revamped target twice and never bought anything. It basically made me get over the stigma that wallmart had to me at the time.

From what I heard (I moved here after Target closed) they didn’t bring in American products. For example: my husband wants to try Lay’s limon chips. They don’t sell them here, and people were looking to Target to bring American exclusive and novelty products across the border. They didn’t.

As a Canadian living in the town that the very first target in Canada moved into, the primary reason it failed is because I think they thought we were stupid? I can get to the U.S by car in a couple hours, or by boat in about an hour, and MANY people head across the border for day trips. We regularly shop in the U.S - including at Target. Apparently Target didn't realize that though, because they were pawning off garbage-quality goods for over twice the price here. I was excited they were moving into Canada, there's a lot of things I got at Target in the states because it was such a better price and it was all good quality stuff. But when I went shopping on opening day here I was appalled, all the stuff they had was garbage-quality, nothing could even compare to what you'd find in a U.S Target, and everything in the store was nearly twice the price of the U.S Target that I'd shopped at the week before. I bought some stuff to compare as I had the EXACT same thing at home that I'd previously purchased from the U.S Target and it was clear as day the quality was vastly inferior, anyone could tell at a single glance it was so obvious - and every single thing I got cost me over double, up to quadruple, as it did in the U.S Target. I thought maybe it was just an opening thing and it might get better, but everything they brought into the store were the rejects they couldn't sell in the U.S, and the prices stayed incredibly over-inflated. It was to the point where shopping at the local mom and pop shops here was better quality AND better price! I don't know what Target was thinking, but MANY Canadians frequently pop down to the states for some shopping fun, so we know what quality and price Target is supposed to be.

I remember my mom buying a Target sale a few years ago at the upper Canada mall, I love Target and hope they go to more countries

Also (and this would make a great video) most Zellers' workers had a union and when Target came in and tried to keep the same employees without one, many of them left or were not hired back. The store near me in Saint-Eustache, Québec had barely any employee because of this...

One other set of reasons comes from the fact that Target's competitors, such as Superstore and Walmart, had ample time and warning that Target was coming to Canada. What ended up happening was that Superstore, a store that focuses mainly on groceries and food items, expanded into clothes, toys, and makeup (or more expanded), and Walmart expanded its retail offerings to match Target's common offerings. As a result, when Target came to Canada and wasn't ready, Target and Superstore toke over Target's niche. Thus, when Target did have stock, it didn't have much of a market because it competitors were prepared well in advance. These problems were in addition to those you mentioned in the video.

In Edmonton, Target took over the Zellers store in Kingsway Mall, and was four months late in opening. The shelves were usually empty; the only time I bought anything there was when 2-litre bottles of pop were on sale.

ALSO luv your video showing Target Canada with Palm Trees in the parking lot.... That must have been really expensive...lol...

I started working for Target in Canada during the holiday season of 2014. We all knew something was wrong when everyone just sat around and was pretty much doing nothing during boxing day. On Jan 5th the following year they made the announcement and I was let go. Now I'm a developer for enterprise software. "Even on the best of days, deadlines, schedules, and roadmaps are just wishful thinking" is the most accurate statement I've heard in a while about our industry.

This is interesting. I'm Canadian and I always tried to put my finger on the reason for the failure. You brought me closer to an understanding. You really had a good understanding of the whole picture. I remember shopping at a Target in Canada and seeing the staged setting of a few products scrunched together looking minimalistic. Compared to Walmart where you had a variety of choices on the aisle you had to sort through before making a decision.

zellers is making a comeback to all the fellow 2000s canadian kids

This story brought on a flash back of learning (& coping) with Oracle's ERP. Fast forward, I took a voluntary demotion and never looked back.

Target exists in Australia, confused me at first because Canada was listed as the only venture abroad

There is Target in Australia, but despite having exactly the same logo, name and type of shop is a completely separate company with no links at all.

I remember hitting up the Zeller's for clearance priced lego sets and then doing it again when the Target shut down, all in all worked out pretty good

one word for this vid: BRILLIANT

I remember getting ready to move to the UK as Target announced it's expansion into Canada. 2 years after I moved the the UK, I visited home in Canada and couldn't find any Targets and when I asked my family about it, they said they had closed down and left the Canadian market. I was surprised and felt a little sad I had missed my chance to shop at a Canadian Target. Fast forward to now and Zeller's is coming back to life.

The Target in Edmonton was Walmart but worse. Same selection and some of the items were more expensive than Walmart. My mother and I stopped in 3 times over the store’s 7 month lifespan. The only time it was worth it was during their closing sales even then it was barely worth it. I got a cheap coat for 85% off during the sale.

My 2 local targets were always stocked and we’d go there for candy before the movies and just hang out there because it was in the local mall. It just had terrible products that were expensive 😊 we were expecting an American target put inside of Canada. They made what they thought Canadians would look for in a target. Canadians still go to target in the US when we’re visiting.

We lived across from a Zellers, on closing, missed it dearly, then Target took over the site. It was so far away from the Zellers experience we only used the store as an inclement weather path to the rest of the plaza and never shopped there.

I work for a large enterprise (supply chain) software company. We had to switch a massive retailer from software they had been using for years over to our new system. It was a train wreck and a year and a half later there are still problems. If this had happened in a different country, too, while trying to open up new stores, i can’t even imagine the disaster it could be.

When the place was closing down my brother needed a baby monitor so we went there and found one with a 50% discount. It was roughly 200$. I scanned the bar code and found the exact same thing on Amazon for 100$. So regular price was 400$ and I could get the same thing for 4 times cheaper on Amazon...

At 2:00 Zellers however is being reintroduced into the Canadian market and with much fanfare as that "1990s Time Capsule" has tapped into the value that such nostalgia represents here in Canada. That and the Hudson's Bay company needs a discount chain all its own to recoup some costs from it's sale merch which doesn't move at its stores!

Funny thing is that I was working for Target during the attempt to expand into Canada. The boxes of repack that came from over the border after the collapse was absolutely hilarious. Just box after box of utter crap they expected us to sell. So much of it ended up being marked down and eventually destroyed.

My buddy worked as a barista in the Starbucks in the target at billings bridge in Ottawa. I remember him telling me constantly how the place was terribly run and they never had anything in stock. It's now a pretty good Wal mart location lol

3:00 The name "Weston" brings a shiver down any Canadians' spine now. Grocery is a duopoly in Canada and Weston's Loblaws have hiked grocery prices 30-50% in the last year.

Thanks for the sick and slick Powerpoint demonstration. Really putting people to shame with it!

I went to target a few times when I was a teen here in Canada. To me it never seemed they had anything that made them stand out over Walmart, Dollarama, Winners type of stores

I used to work at the Balzac distribution centre (eleven points logistics) as an inventory control coordinator, it was a decent job that paid well. Their inventory management was pretty archaic tho. I spend my days in a scissor lift counting every single item in the 3million square foot warehouse over and over.

I know exactly why Target failed, here in Newfoundland, it normally takes us a solid DECADE to get our first location when a franchise first comes to Canada. The day Target opened in Canada, Newfoundland had 2 locations. That was great for me as I personally L-O-V-E-D Target here in Canada while we had it, but bad for me in the long run as that is absolutely not how to grow a successful business.

I am Canadian, and I have never been inside of a Target. There was a Zellers 20 minutes away from where I lived, and then there was just an empty shell. Our local small city wasn't deemed important enough for a Target, and thus the empty corpse of the Zellers just sat there for _years_ (the mall had to put up a wall in the way of the former entrance). Then years later I went to university in a city that had been large enough for Target to notice it and once again I was treated to the corpse of a box store, this time done up in Target's red and white. Honestly, the entire event felt more like a weird cross of a natural disaster and urban blight than any kind of business move.

As a Canadian I always love hearing this, seriously, they teach this in business schools now.

Target came into Canada replacing Zellers which was the discounted partner of parent company The Bay. After waiting a year or 2, Target started to open stores to my surprise the pricing was equal to or even higher than that of the Bay. No one wants to pay more for inferior quality. That was what I experienced and heard of from friends.

Former store employee here, another fatal software issue that happened was the Point of Sale system. It was buggy and not even close to the US version. The Canadian version, known as "Retalix" at the time, crashed regularly or at times didn't even process payments (card transactions approved, but just never took the money). Also, mixed into the SAP side, while stores would get alerted if items were at a "near-zero" amount so they could replenish, if the quantity reached a negative value, the software wouldn't do anything, wouldn't alert, etc (e.g. if there were actually ten of the item but the system was at zero, then five of them sold; the system would say -5).

Canadian from Vancouver Island here. We were excited to get Target here, as a lot of us had shopped at one before while visiting states. The stores were never fully stocked that I ever saw, and the prices were so much higher than we expected. It was a huge let down.

I lived close to the Milton Target (one of the first 3 locations) and store was basically just a worse version of the Zellers that was there before That place was insanely busy for a while because like you said Canadians really did want to give it a chance. But both the inventory they had as well as how little there was really killed it’s chances in our town fast

I agree with your assessment, but Target had one other MAJOR flaw in their expansion. Canadians wanted American Target in Canada. Literally just press copy and paste, so that a Canadian wouldn't even know they weren't in an American Target. Instead, we got a watered down version of American Target with different brands at a different price point... In addition to everything you talk about in the video.

I worked for SAP in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1990’s and was shocked with how many manufacturing customers were not fully online. There were maybe two companies who would provide references and tours of their facilities. The backstory was that the SAP software had so many options and switches that there was no documentation on what the result would be on an operation! Customized sofware patches were put in where the software didn’t work as desired, and that was not disclosed to potential customers. It built its clientele by winning the support of the big accounting firms, who saw losts of consulting contracts, so they pushed their clients to move ahead and buy. It amazes me that lawsuits did not overwhelm SAP.

I remember the opening day of the target in my hometown , the store was almost completely empty .