For the last year or so, Target, America’s other national big-box discount store, has been struggling. Its leaders blamed falling sales on shoppers renovating their houses, on lower traffic to pharmacies after they were sold to CVS, and on customers’ general disinterest in shopping. In the last year, Target refocused on fundamentals instead of retail innovations, and that has paid off in more customer traffic and improved sales. [More]
target pharmacy
CVS: Nope, We Aren’t Bringing Back The Target Pharmacy Bottles Everyone Loves
By 9.28.16
When Target reported its last batch of quarterly results, CEO Brian Cornell noted that visits to its in-store pharmacies were down after the conversion of those pharmacies to mini CVS stores. Readers explained to us why they left, and a popular reason was that CVS ditched Target’s easy-to-use red prescription bottles. Some customers held on to hope that CVS would deploy the bottles across its whole chain now that it owns the patent. Now we know the answer: nope. [More]
Where Did The Target Prescription Bottles Everyone Loves So Much Come From, Anyway?
By 8.24.16
We didn’t realize how much affection consumers had for Target’s ClearRX prescription bottling system until the bottles went away after CVS purchased Target’s pharmacies. Maybe customers themselves didn’t realize how attached they were to those bottles until they were consigned to memory, but with the CVS takeover of Target’s pharmacy business, they’re now gone. Why are people so attached to a prescription bottle, though? [More]
Customers: CVS Takeover Erased Everything Good About Target Pharmacies
By 8.23.16
One of the reasons that Target gave for its poor performance during a recent earnings call was that stores may have lost some foot traffic because of “some disruptions” when the discount store sold its pharmacy business to CVS. We wondered what that meant, and asked if readers had experienced those “disruptions.” They had, but the bigger problem is something that Target’s executives may not have realized: people filled prescriptions there because they liked things that Target did differently. [More]
Target Sales Are Down Because Customers Are Fixing Up Their Homes Instead
By 8.17.16
Target’s first comparable stores sales decrease in two years is partly due to the retailer’s problems with actually selling groceries, but the drop also reflects problems with the national retail landscape as a whole. Target expected sales to increase slightly, but instead, Americans are apparently paying for experiences rather than stuff, heading to buy clothes at off-price stores, and buying supplies to remodel our homes. [More]
