May 1, 1962 - The First Target Opens

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Once again, another legendary retailer celebrates theirgolden anniversary. It’s none other than Target, “the upscale discounter”,which officially launched 50 years ago today yesterday. Pictured above is the very firstTarget store, located in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb just north of the TwinCities. From this humble beginning came one of today’s most successful andinfluential retailers, and one of the world’s most iconicbrands.    As mentioned ad nauseam on this site and in many otherquarters, Target’s founding year, 1962, was the year of the discount storerevolution. Walmart and Kmart, the industry’s other two key players, were alsofounded that year, as were a number of others, including Woolworth’slong-departed Woolco division and Big K, a southeastern chain that waseventually acquired by Walmart. These chains and their coincidental founding year were allmentioned in our previous observance of Kmart's 50th a couple ofmonths back,  but no sooner were thepixels dry on that post (Don’t you just hate expressions like that?) than Irecalled some others that trace their origin to 1962 – Shopko, a Green BayWisconsin-based chain, still exists. Sky City, based in Asheville, NorthCarolina with locations throughout the Southeast, unfortunately no longer does.I’ll probably think of some more within minutes after posting this. Target differs in a fundamental way from Walmart and Kmart,its two key competitors over the last 30 years or so (and for the foreseeablefuture), and this difference can be traced back to the companies’ roots. “Kmartwas founded by a dime store company (S.S.Kresge) and Wal-Mart was a varietystore company (Sam Walton’s Ben Franklin franchises),” said former Targetexecutive Norm McMillan to Laura Rowley, author of On Target, an entertaininglywritten history of the company, while “The background of the Target enterprisewas the department store business – so that influenced our strategic planningand the way stores were run.”Indeed, The Dayton Company, founded in Minneapolis in 1902,had long been considered one of America’s best run department store firms. Sowell run, in fact, that they found themselves having to fend off a good deal offlak from their prestigious department store cohorts about their decision to goslumming in the discount world. Rowley quotes Target president Douglas Daytonin a 1966 speech to the Associated Merchandising Corporation: “I start with theassumption that all of you …wish that discount stores had never been invented,and I have no quarrel with that wish. It is a perfectly natural one. The catchis that it doesn’t seem to have impaired discount stores’ progress one iota…Tosome I may be laboring the point; to others - and I have to be perfectly frank -you have underestimated what is going on.” (This would have made a nice extraverse for Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin'”, don’t you think? Just need to come up with a good quadruple rhyme.) A major change in consumer buying patterns was afoot,and Dayton bravely chose to jump into the fray. Generally conservative, the Dayton Company could nonetheless claim a pretty bold move in their recent history. In 1954, they developed thenation’s first enclosed mall, Southdale Shopping Center, in Edina, a southwestsuburb of Minneapolis. Dayton took the then-unusual step of inviting a keydepartment store rival, Donaldson’s, to join the project. They engaged VictorGruen, an Austrian-born architect with visions of the mall as a ‘civilizingforce for the sprawling suburbs’, to design the center. Southdale jump-startedGruen’s career as an architect of unparalleled influence over the ensuingdecade. For Dayton, it proved to be a financial winner and an anchor for theirsuburban “branch store” strategy.In one sense, however, the concept of the discount store wasreally just an update of a time-honored department store tradition – the“basement store”, usually a basement or sub-level of a downtown flagship storereserved for bargain and closeout merchandise. Dayton’s had one in theirNicollet Avenue home base, as did many well-known department store operatorsacross the country. While bargain hunting has been a great American pursuit foreons, in decades past there was often a certain stigma (unfairly) conferredupon those who consistently shopped “downstairs”, whether out of need orpreference, instead of on the main floor. The discount stores, having no“upstairs” per se, erased this stigma, and their suburban locations put themcloser to the fastest-growing base of customers.  After some months of fact-finding “undercover missions” todiscount store chains across the country by Dayton managers (Topps in Chicago,on a growth tear at the time, was one they particularly liked), the firstTarget store opened on May 1 in Roseville. It was a 68,000 square foot storewith a surprisingly large grocery department -25,000 sq. ft., leased out toApplebaum’s Food Market of St. Paul. (Somewhere I remember seeing a photo of avery cool-looking ice cream carton with the original Target “bullseye” logo onit. Hopefully I’ll come across it again one of these days.)   According to Rowley, the general merchandise mix was 65percent hardlines (“auto supplies and appliances”) and 35 percent softlines (“clothingand accessories”).  Roseville was thefirst of four units launched that year – three in the greater Twin Cities area(Crystal and Knollwood/St. Louis Park being the others) and one a bit furthernorth in Duluth. This 1965 photo of the Duluth store shows just how quickly thechain’s architectural style evolved from the very modest design of the first Target. Throughout the balance of the 1960’s, growth was “steady andmethodical” when compared to Kmart at least, who were burning up thecountryside with some 35 new stores a year at the time.  Three years passed before the opening of thenext Target in Bloomington, Minnesota in 1965. The next year, 1966, sawTarget’s first expansion market, Denver (Glendale and Westland Centers),followed by two more on the home turf, Fridley and West St. Paul, Minnesota in1967. In 1968, Target expanded into St. Louis with North and South Countystores. A third store was added in Bridgeton the next year. The close of thedecade saw Target stores in Dallas (North Dallas and Garland, with a VillageFair location added in 1970) and Houston (Hedwig Village and South Loop, withSharpstown added in 1970), along with a unit in Colorado Springs.  One probable reason for the measured approach was the simplefact that Dayton had a lot of things on their plate in the late 60’s, puttingit mildly. In 1969, Dayton bought out the Detroit-based J.L. Hudson Company,“the nation’s largest independently owned department store operation”, as their1968 annual report put it. Now called Dayton-Hudson Corporation, and with morethan double the department store operations as before, the acquisitions didn’tstop there. That same year they picked up Lechmere, a Boston-based electronicand appliance retailer, whose operations were lumped in with Target’s as partof D-H’s “Low-Margin Division.”  Thesemoves coincided with a major expansion of Dayton’s bookstore operations, whichwere launched in 1966. Bruce Dayton, the company president, decided to name thecompany’s bookstores after himself, substituting one letter in the last name,of course – “B. Dalton Booksellers”, a mainstay of shopping malls for decades.    Whether or not it was a deliberate part of the strategy, therewas certainly an added benefit to the slower rollout of the Target stores. Itenabled Dayton-Hudson to hone Target’s upscale image – the key differentiator thatled to the furious post 1980-growth and high repute the company enjoys today- over time. Their faux French nickname, “Tar-zhay”, surfaced almost right off thebat, according to Douglas Dayton, Target’s original division president, whotold author Laura Rowley he first heard customers using the word at the Duluth storeway back in 1962. For a time, they even used “Miss Target” (actually pronounced“Miss Tar-zhay”!) for their private label line of women’s shoes.  Eventually a stronger graphic image was needed, and for thatTarget reached out to Unimark International, the legendary Chicago-based designfirm responsible for some of the most enduring corporate identities in businesshistory, including those of American Airlines and Ford Motor Company. (And onethat many of us wish had endured - the 1971-2011 JCPenney logo.) It’s hard tooverstate Unimark’s effect on the world of corporate design, especially in thelate 60’s and early 70’s, when the world seemed to change overnight from a graphicalstone soup to solid-color backgrounds and Helvetica.  In 1969, the new logo was introduced -a single, thicker ringaround the bullseye replaced the double-ringed earlier versions, and Helvetica supplantedthe multiplicity of fonts Target previously used. Another very significant Unimarkcontribution was the widespread use of the color red, which all these yearslater, Target virtually “owns” from a retail standpoint.  Gotta love those red plastic shopping carts, right? And the “Target Lady”. And those retro products (like cereals and detergent) they keep featuring.Here’s to another 50 years!   The photo above is from the fascinating book UNIMARK INTERNATIONAL – The Design of Business and the Business of Design by Jan Conradi and appears here through the courtesyof Kevin Rau, the book’s designer and archivist of the stunning collection ofartifacts that illustrate the book. This book is essential for design fans and isan incredible business history as well. Forget Mad Men, this was the real thing!(Ok, don’t forget Mad Men. Sorry for even bringing that up.) Kevin has his own design firm,Rauhaus, based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he specializes in corporateidentity, publication design and wonderful printed work using classic letterpresstechnology. Thanks also to Michael Doty for the tip on the greatcirca-1970 Target commercials below. Note the combination of the new Target logowith some of the “hodgepodge” mentioned above. Fun stuff!