An Open Letter to Target (formerly Dayton-Hudson) Corp. re : Le Boutique Targét

Attention: Target Corporate Retail Merchandise Manager

{CC: Store Mgr./Merchandise Mgrs.:

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Dear silver-medal discount retail kings,

I take virtual pen in hand because it seems you - individually and/or collectively - need a wake-up call about the state of your business.

I write, not about your atrocious corporate policy of grooming children and sexualizing them at an early age with your dreadful LGBTEIEIO agenda, nor even to chide you for the fact that most of your establishments look perpetually as if they had just been pillaged by swarms of Vikings and Visigoths rampaging through the aisles mounted on herds of wildebeests and rhinocerii fed on a diet of methamphetamine and PCP. No, this is about nothing so controversial nor obvious.

And before we get to the crux of the matter, let me start off with a compliment. Your Mondo Llama line of acrylic paints, the entire rainbow of 63 of them (not counting the chalk shades) are simply excellent, and a superb value for the money, providing all the quality necessary for a host of artistic endeavors for less than $2/bottle, when one doesn't need to spend nor obtain commercial artist-quality tubes of the pricier stuff. I frankly couldn't be happier with the product line, and bonus for you, it's one of your store-brand lines.

Having said that, I'm not writing to criticize you now, but rather to offer my heartfelt condolences.

I offer them for what must be a constant source of despair at every level, for the simply abysmal level of illiterate, color-blind, downright stupid and lazy so-called associates you must be forced to hire to stock your shelves.

Is someone holding a gun to your personnel managers' heads when you hire such a shiftless bunch of incompetent retards? Should we call the police? Is it a federal law we need to raise the hue and cry about which requires you to employ such an all-around bunch of lackadaisical doofusii, and entrust them the incredibly complex task of - horrors! - putting things on the shelves where they belong??

Tell us how we can help you; we're here for you.

I ask because - just spit balling here, not telling such a huge corporation how to run their business, mind you - I have a wee suspicion that if you could somehow put the right colors of paint where they're supposed to go, you'd, y'know, SELL MORE OF THEM. Crazy, right? Let me know if I'm wildly out of line there with such rampant speculation.

I can only commiserate with you because not only are the plainly visible colors of the Mondo Llama paint bottles not an actual clue for the people who're entrusted every week with stocking them in the right spots, but because the names of each color are written in English on both the shelves, and the bottle tops. Almost like if someone could read English, let alone look at the flipping colors of paint inside, they could actually work out which bottles go in which place on the store shelves. Every. Single. Time. Mirabile dictu!

Do your employees need an emotional support animal to help them discern colors? Would putting a giant See-N-Spell on all store shelves help them to get all 63 colors in the right places? I'm baffled.

I just wanted to let you know that, to the extent the colors are correctly located in the stores I CC'ed in on this communication, it's because I take about 2 minutes whenever I'm in one of those stores to straighten them out. You're welcome. I have a leg up on your employees, obviously, because I'm neither color-blind nor illiterate. Just in case you wanted me to check my non-retard not-colorblind privilege.

The pity for you is, you can't seem to be able to motivate any of your $15/hr. employees to spend less than a dollar's worth of your company time to do the same thing. That'd be...work! Icky!

Yeah, I suppose it's a little OCD. And I know, many of your other customers "help" you by putting things on shelves all over the store when they're too lazy to walk them back where they got them, but this isn't that. I know, because I continuously find three bottles of paint with your pick labels attached to the lot, all the same color, and all mis-located. At every store. Every time I drop in. Because that's how your flunkies stock them.

Maybe you could think about doing an Ishihara Color Blindness Test before you hire people. You could still hire the ones that are color-blind, and get some ADA cred and points; and then, just not ask them to sort items by color. You're on your own what to do about the ones who can't read (maybe remedial English classes for the Common Core high school grads?), and the lazy doofuses.

Apparently, to Target employees, any color of blue is
interchangeable with every other color of blue.
And if you can read the number in this test, it's also
evidently the average Target employee IQ.

Why do I get worked up about the fact that you have thousands of employees stocking your shelves who can't read, can't see colors, and/or don't give a damn? (Worst case for you, all of the above.)

Well, it's like this: Back in the day, when Van Halen (they're a rock band; maybe you've heard of them? You sell their albums...) used to have an infamous clause (#126) in their voluminous tour contract that there would be bowls of M&Ms backstage. But absolutely NO brown ones.

And if they saw a brown M&M, it was a breach of contract, and they could cancel the entire show, for cause, with full compensation owed.

Not because they hated brown M&Ms. Not because they were divas. But because they wanted to make sure, with tons of equipment, electricity, and pyrotechnics going off on a huge show, to ensure the safety of the band, their roadies, and their fans, they wanted a quick test of whether the concert promoters had read the contract and were following the rules.

It was a bellwether; a canary-in-the-coal-mine, if you will, to see if the people they were entrusting their safety to were doing their jobs.

And that's how I feel about the paint in your craft aisle. If you can't hire people that can get something that simple and basic right, how can you be expected to get anything right that's harder than that??

You guys have exactly three jobs: Stock the shelves, open the doors, and ring up the sales. (And let's get serious: you've tried to outsource that last one to your customers for years, and now you're shocked that one's blown up in your faces.) And if you now can't stock the shelves either, you won't have to worry about opening the doors for much longer either.

QED

So I feel for you, both individually and corporately. Not to mention for your stockholders.

Waaaaaay back in the misty past, like many youngsters embarking on gainful employment, I started out in retail too. At a place called Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Maybe some of the older folks there remember them? At the time I worked there, they really were "where America shopped". They parlayed catalog sales into the premier retail establishment in the country. But they had technological myopia: they couldn't see the internet as the logical extension of their catalog, and you and everyone else ate their lunch, metaphorically.

You folks, with hundreds (1956, at last count) of stores in all 50 states seem to have lost sight of the idea that you're running actual brick-and-mortar stores. And that it's your bread and butter. You get the online aspect; but if your master plan is to be a smaller version of Bezos-mart, with less selection, you're well on your way to becoming the next Sears story.

I feel even sorrier for you when I consider how it got this way. Because as I learned from masters of the craft in the military, you only get the compliance with orders you inspect for.

So this means you not only have incompetent, slovenly, or outright incapable employees, you have nearly 2000 store managers and merchandise managers who frankly don't give a flying fig about this. If they even know about it, because they never check. You'll have to decide for yourselves whether their apathy or their ignorance is worse. And you're paying them for this!

At least your hired flunkies aren't so stupid or incompetent (...yet) they put the paint bottles in the candy or cake frosting aisle, but that's a pretty low bar, don't you think?

I'm not a stock market guy, but if I was, or even if I was invested in it, I think I'd be shorting your stock.

Maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe things are great at the other 1949 stores, and it's just every store within 5 miles of me that can't pull off such a simple task. Ever. Any day in the last several years. Anytime I've checked.

But, like I said, I'm not criticizing you. You do whatever you think best.

I just feel sad that you're paying huge numbers of people (and soon, even starting them out here in Califrutopia at $20/hr minimum!) to be so utterly incapable of doing the most basic function in retail: putting things on the store shelves. And they keep getting it wrong every day, and no one in charge - all hired by you - notices or cares.

But now, we can both live in hope: Me, that anyone in your entire corporation important enough to make a change cares enough to start running your business like a business instead of thinking it's going to run itself; and you, that if they did, I'd drop dead from utter shock.