CHAPTER O N E Taking Aim he Dayton family had been in the retail business since 1902 when George Draper Dayton and a partner opened Goodfellow's Dry Goods in a six story building in downtown Minneapolis Minnesota With an orchestra serenading customers and well dressed clerks happily ringing up their purchases of everything from fine clothing and jewelry to blankets carpets and curtains the store soon became a popular venue Within a year Dayton had bought out his partner and switched out Goodfellow's with his own name In 1911 he renamed the store once again now calling it The Dayton Company Dayton his sons and his grandsons spent the next several decades building that business on the corner of Nicollet Avenue and Seventh Street in Minneapolis It doubled in size and turned a tidy profit every year Eventually it became clear that the store needed to expand its reach In 1954 the company opened the first branch store in nearby Rochester Minnesota and in 1956 it built the first enclosed shopping mall in the country with a Dayton's store anchoring one end ofit in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina THE STORY OF TARGET
DAYTONS EETE ID ID IDY TONS GE AN iHil MILES Dayton s customers of the early 1900s traveled to downtown Minneapolis by foot horse and car T AR G ET
But Dayton's was known as an upscale retail outlet and in the late 1950s and early 1960s shopping trends seemed to be shifting toward discount retail ing In 1960 the Dayton family saw an opportunity to enlarge their business by transferring the successful Dayton's format to a discount store The new stores they decided in 1962 would be called Target and they would maintain the reputation Dayton's had built for having a clean atmosphere friendly ser vice and quality products The biggest difference would be the discount prices Kmart was founded by a dime store company Wal Mart was a variety store com pany said longtime Target executive Norman McMillar The background of the Target enterprise was the department store business so that influenced our strategic planning and the way the stores were run The Dayton Company invested 4 million and Target president Douglas Dayton and his team dedicated hundreds of hours to preparing to launch the first four Target stores in 1962 Their goals were to stock the stores with new interesting high quality products and to keep the prices for those products low by cutting expenses and reducing their profit margins The first store opened in the St Paul suburb of Roseville in May that was foll lowed by stores in the Minneapolis suburbs of St Louis Park and Crystal then another in Duluth a city with a population of approximately 106 000 located a little more than 3 hours north of Minneapolis St Paul Those four stores sold more than 11 4 million of merchandise in their first year of business not quite enough to break even with expenses In fact the Target division suffered a loss of more than 600 000 its first year And because the store's purchasing division had miscalculated how much of certain prod ucts to order they found themselves with almost 1 million in extra inventory at year s end that had to be sold on clearance in 1963 But by 1964 they had fig ured out the ordering process and streamlined their systems Sales soared to 27 million bringing in a profit of 630 000 for the company Although the other new discount stores including Kmart and Wal Mart were THE STORY OF TARGE T
You can discount at any quality level Partly because of our heritage we decided that the soundest position was to establish ourselves as the quality discounter DouGLAS DAYTON FORMER TARGET PRESIDENT arget T hese are SMT Roseville Minnesota was home to the first Target store which became a SuperTarget in 2005 T AR G ET
