Target's big day

I arrive in the largely empty parking lot a few minutes before 8 a.m. and note that there is no sign of a mad rush at the automatic doors.

It’s opening time on the biggest sales day of the biggest sales week for any Target location in the country. That’s right — despite the hype about Black Friday sales volume and the stampeding bargain-hunters of Christmastime, the prime revenue-generating period for Target stores is actually the back-to-school (specifically, back-to-college) period. And the Bloomington Target location is the king of them all.

Between IU’s first day of early move-in and the Saturday before classes start, this Target store is a maelstrom of customer, worker, supervisor and (in my case) people-watcher activity.

But this flurry of activity doesn’t get concentrated in the hour after opening time and dissipate throughout the day. Instead, traffic steadily picks up between opening time and about 10 a.m. and, according to several employees’ estimates, stays largely constant through the afternoon and evening.

So, while I am still one of only a few “guests” (as the well-trained staff calls its customers) in the store, several workers continue to stock shelves in order to replenish the cache of goods that was depleted on the previous day.

As the array of fluorescent lights illuminates the recently dim facility, I see towering stacks of excess inventory piled atop shelving units and even along the outside of the clothing area of the store.

By closing time, these stacks will have diminished significantly as a result of returning students’ voracious appetite for appliances, storage devices and everything else that makes an apartment, house or dorm room a home away from home.

At midday, the grand production is in full swing, as parking spaces are hard to come by, aisles are packed with nervous students and hovering parents, and staff are keeping shelves stocked and customers happy.

This onslaught continues largely unabated through the dinner hours, several employees tell me.

Shortly before closing time, the store has once again quieted down, but it is a far different spectacle than it was some 13 hours before.

Now, many shelves — and some whole aisles — are almost totally bare, and others are strewn with products customers managed to disorganize faster than workers could put them back.

This college town’s Target staff has made it through another hectic day in the back-to-college campaign.

Getting ready for this week every year requires “tons and tons of planning,” Guest Service Team Leader Matt Potter, an IU senior and student in SPEA, tells me.

Potter says the planning process begins shortly after the Christmas shopping season ends and that handling the surge in sales necessitates an “all hands on deck” approach, one that even requires temporary hiring.

As activity in the vast retail establishment is about to enter its overnight lull, I pause to reflect on the spectacle I have just witnessed.

Over the past 15 hours, a staff of several dozen people, whose efforts are supported by many thousands in a supply chain that stretches around the globe, has engaged in a monumental exercise in free exchange with the hordes of customers who came ready to pay for the goods they requested.

Buyers chose to pay because the products were worth more to them than their prices, sellers chose to sell because the prices were worth more to them than the products.

And all was right with the world.


E-mail: jarlower@indiana.edu