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Minneapolis
Target misses its target: US retail giant Target is “off target again”, says Andrea Felsted on Bloomberg. Hot on the heels of its last profit warning last month, which caused its shares to fall the hardest since 1987, the big-box operator now expects a second-quarter operating margin of some 2%, down from its late-May estimate of around 5.3%. That imperils its margin guidance of about 6% for the full-year, whether or not it is able to recover its margin in the second half of the year. Target expects full-year revenue growth in the low- to mid-single percentage digits.
The problem is simple, says Jinjoo Lee in The Wall Street Journal. There is too much stuff in its stores and warehouses and, as buying habits change following the pandemic, it’s not the stuff consumers want to buy now. Target’s inventories swelled to 43% last quarter from a year earlier, while comparable sales grew by just 3.3%. Like its peers Walmart and Costco, Target took advantage of its size to charter its
