This week, Target has suddenly gotten slammed by customers and employees who accuse the retailer of understaffing stores across the country. Social media and the Target subgroup on Reddit show lines stretching beyond the field of vision, assistance delays in the aisles, and whole rows of dark checkout registers.
One X post that went viral on Tuesday shows a line of what seems to be a dozen carts–until it disappears into the distance–under the caption, “I don’t even know what to say about this. ONE cashier?!”
The problems coincide with what employees tell Fast Company is a new corporate policy, that so far Target has not publicly acknowledged instituting yet. It reduced the hours of self-checkout in the name of battling inventory loss, they say–both intentional shoplifting, which is easier in self-checkout, and the “shrink” dreaded by corporate boardrooms when customers don’t properly scan items.
Over the past decade, Target has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into renovating stores. Installing fancy self-checkout bays were a big part of this facelift. But according to the workers who spoke to Fast Company, a new corporate policy has been announced to scale back self-checkout (for a second time; it tried capping items at 10 or fewer last fall, to help “reduce wait times and better understand guest preferences”).
So far, this new move seems to be getting rolled out in a haphazard fashion. Employees describe their stores disabling the option for guests in the morning, or in the late evening, or sometimes both. According to Target’s website, normal store hours run from 7 or 8 a.m. to 10 or 11 p.m. Target didn’t respond to Fast Company‘s inquiries asking for help clarifying the new adjusted hours for consumers. However, various employees said that as of this week, their self-checkouts no longer open until as late as 11 a.m., and in some cases shut down as early as 8 p.m.
One employee told us at their store, the new policy was described as “the 50/50 ratio,” to reflect Target’s preferred split between guests in self-checkout and the regular checkout lanes. This person said after the policy was announced on Sunday, team members were asked to “hover like hawks” at the front of the store (the employee’s words, not management’s) to persuade shoppers to wait in a line for one of the two available registers that frequently ran five to 10 guests deep.
Skeleton staffs are sometimes viewed as a necessary evil by major retailers, where the formula of fewer employees juggling heavier workloads for lower wages usually helps the balance sheet. But that’s why retailers warmed to self-checkout in the first place: It is faster, plus frees up staff to handle other duties.
Irked employees speaking out this week noted the irony that Target seems to think reducing self-checkout service, without a plan to increase labor, will save on costs, but a single customer abandoning their cart is a bigger hourly loss than scheduling another $15-an-hour worker, and might even exceed inventory lost in one hour from retail theft.
“Our short staffing has been such a problem,” one self-described worker wrote on Reddit, saying that at their store, “We call for backup constantly, and no one else can get their work done.” Scaling down self-checkout “is going to affect the entire store,” they warned.
Short-staffing can, of course, come back to bite retailers. Several times in recent years, including most recently last week, CVS pharmacy locations have been fined for not scheduling enough workers. The pharmacy in the latest scandal had fallen more than an entire month behind on prescription refills. It so happens that CVS purchased Target’s pharmacy business back in 2015, and has handled all of the drug dispensing since.
Since Sunday, customers also say they’re enduring longer delays elsewhere in the store, such as with retrieving items kept behind locked cases. Locking up products is another policy that both CVS and Target have come under fire for lately, though they argue it’s an effective theft deterrent. Naturally though, unlocking cases is now a job that store employees must juggle on top of tidying shelves, restocking them, processing returns, rehanging clothes that shoppers knock off, and babysitting customers in self-checkout who invariably get an item that won’t scan or scans wrong.
During Target’s earnings call in November, CEO Brian Cornell addressed the worry that customers are mad about finding their toothpaste and underwear trapped behind a glass panel. “Actually what we hear from the guests is a big ‘thank you,’” he told investors, because it means the merchandise is in stock instead of stolen. “We’ve invested in team member labor in those aisles [to] make sure we’re there to greet that guest,” he also added.
For every thankful customer Cornell met, though, there may be a Target shopper online saying they’d rather die than buzz an employee to give them deodorant.
From 2019 to today, Target added around 80,000 employees. During that time period, its store count climbed from 1,868 to 1,956–fewer than 100 stores in five years. What are all of these extra workers doing, one might wonder?
Target didn’t respond to that question. There are some clues, though. Since 2022, it has focused on a new store design: a larger format with “nearly 150,000 square feet . . . more than 20,000 square feet larger than the chain average.”
Meanwhile, the stores have gotten livelier. Target has pivoted to pushing what it calls “immersive retail experiences“–basically, mini Ulta Beauty, Walt Disney, Levi’s, and Apple stores tucked inside, turning its supercenters into malls. It’s also worked to dial up the perks for shoppers. Last spring, Target unveiled Drive Up Returns, which is what it sounds like: an option where shoppers nationwide can “return most new, unopened items within 90 days of purchase from the comfort of their car–for free.”
This expanded upon another feature already available nationwide, simply called Drive Up, that brought the same convenience to the purchasing side: Customers can shop in advance online, open the Target app when they pull up and tap “I’m here,” and a store employee will collect their items, hunt down their vehicle in the parking lot, load the bags into their car, and even fetch them their favorite “pick-me-up” from the in-store Starbucks if they prefer.
This article originally appeared on FastCompany.com.
(c) 2024 Mansueto Ventures LLC; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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