Target posts a stunning drop in profit. Stock plunges

PSA

Trucks don’t get “cancelled”. They simply get held for a short period of time. Most of the time the transportation managers will tell your SD/DSD to suck it. We don’t have unlimited room or unlimited extra trucks for a 100+ stores to delay trucks because their management can’t run their store
Maybe its not management. Maybe too much stuff is being shipped. Maybe the DCs should hold onto stuff until actually needed. Maybe the DCs should stop buying too much crap.
 
Maybe its not management. Maybe too much stuff is being shipped. Maybe the DCs should hold onto stuff until actually needed. Maybe the DCs should stop buying too much crap.
That’s not how it works at all. The DC doesn’t purchase anything. We make zero decisions about what comes into our building. Purchasing is done on a corporate level. Your gripe is with HQ not us

Same thing with what gets sent. We don’t magically decide what we send to the stores. Drops of labels are generated by what our system tells us we need to send to the stores that day. Again. Not our call. We can’t control what we send on a grand scale

And we don’t have unlimited room. We all get that you guys get too much stuff. But so do we. We receive in 100,000 boxes some days while only sending out 60,000. We run optimally at around 85% building capacity.

We are literally the middle men between corporate and stores. I get really sick of people blaming us like we are choosing to fuck you guys over everyday
 
That’s not how it works at all. The DC doesn’t purchase anything. We make zero decisions about what comes into our building. Purchasing is done on a corporate level. Your gripe is with HQ not us

Same thing with what gets sent. We don’t magically decide what we send to the stores. Drops of labels are generated by what our system tells us we need to send to the stores that day. Again. Not our call. We can’t control what we send on a grand scale

And we don’t have unlimited room. We all get that you guys get too much stuff. But so do we. We receive in 100,000 boxes some days while only sending out 60,000. We run optimally at around 85% building capacity.

We are literally the middle men between corporate and stores. I get really sick of people blaming us like we are choosing to fuck you guys over everyday

I always laugh when people don't understand how DCs work. It's not just Jim standing on the dock saying "I like these comforters. Let's send a pallet to every store today."

At least the buyers at HQ have settled down a little bit after the last year of markdown city because they screwed up 2022.
 
everything woke turns to $hit ….that’s why target stocks dropped
Yeah the investor class is known for its disregard of conditions like shipping costs, inflation, employment, consumer spending, etc. They're primarily concerned about the subtle ways that merchandisers may be signaling feelings about genitals and skin tone.
 
There's some disingenuous posting going on in this thread about DCs... at least a little bit. Speaking from someone who once upon a time worked at the slowest store in a particular district, some of our trucks would have a LOT of extra space in them. And it's not an opinion, it's a fact... that store would get a lot of extra clearance thrown onto those trucks because there was physical room to do it, even though it made far less sense to dump it there because it was obviously less likely to sell. You could check the on hands of a particular product and that store would have literally hundreds more than any other store, even some high volume stores, that were in the same district. And some of those stores would have 0 or 1 or 2 on hands, with a location still represented on the sales floor, and my store would have hundreds just sitting in the back on pallets.

That is not corporate doing that. That is the DC saying "we have to get rid of this shit, that truck is empty, fuck that store."

It's been so long now that some of the details have been lost and perhaps we were designated as some type of markdown store that received extra shit that was going clearance, but we were the ONLY ONE within a 100+ mile radius that would have these crazy on hand numbers for shit that definitely wasn't going to sell because of our volume. And it wasn't always items getting ready to go clearance. Sometimes it would be pallets of glade branded candles that all stores were continuing to carry going forward. It would make no sense from a sales perspective coming out of corporate to dump everything on the store that was least likely to sell it. That was the DC needing space and fucking us because our trucks had a lot of empty room. Point blank period. I'm not saying that DCs create the manifests and pick and choose all of what they're sending but there's no shot they have ZERO decision making process on ANYTHING that gets sent out. I don't believe that for one second.

Not to mention the dozens of times we would get stuff like pallets of cat litter on top of pallets of paper. I can't speak for all DCs but based on what we dealt with store side from the DC at Midway, GA that was servicing a lot of stores in that region including my old store in Florida... the turnover rate was either alarmingly high or the supervisors at the DC weren't doing their jobs at all. Maybe both. This was a time period of like 2007-2015, for what it's worth.
 
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There's some disingenuous posting going on in this thread about DCs... at least a little bit. Speaking from someone who once upon a time worked at the slowest store in a particular district, some of our trucks would have a LOT of extra space in them. And it's not an opinion, it's a fact... that store would get a lot of extra clearance thrown onto those trucks because there was physical room to do it, even though it made far less sense to dump it there because it was obviously less likely to sell. You could check the on hands of a particular product and that store would have literally hundreds more than any other store, even some high volume stores, that were in the same district. And some of those stores would have 0 or 1 or 2 on hands, with a location still represented on the sales floor, and my store would have hundreds just sitting in the back on pallets.

That is not corporate doing that. That is the DC saying "we have to get rid of this shit, that truck is empty, fuck that store."

It's been so long now that some of the details have been lost and perhaps we were designated as some type of markdown store that received extra shit that was going clearance, but we were the ONLY ONE within a 100+ mile radius that would have these crazy on hand numbers for shit that wasn't going to sell. It would make no sense from a sales perspective coming out of corporate to dump everything on the store that was least likely to sell it. That was the DC needing space and fucking us because our trucks had a lot of empty room. Point blank period. I'm not saying that DCs create the manifests and pick and choose all of what they're sending but there's no shot they have ZERO decision making process on ANYTHING that gets sent out. I don't believe that for one second.

Not to mention the dozens of times we would get stuff like pallets of cat litter on top of pallets of paper. I can't speak for all DCs but based on what we dealt with store side from the DC at Midway, GA that was servicing a lot of stores in that region including my old store in Florida... the turnover rate was either alarmingly high or the supervisors at the DC weren't doing their jobs at all. Maybe both. This was a time period of like 2007-2015, for what it's worth.
They are speaking from today's situation at the DC's. Not 15 years ago.
 
PSA

Trucks don’t get “cancelled”. They simply get held for a short period of time. Most of the time the transportation managers will tell your SD/DSD to suck it. We don’t have unlimited room or unlimited extra trucks for a 100+ stores to delay trucks because their management can’t run their store
When we "cancel" a truck because management deems it necessary, it sits on our dock, double parked, or off to the side of the store waiting for us to get to it. We keep the trucks coming so it doesn't stuff up the DC.
 
They are speaking from today's situation at the DC's. Not 15 years ago.

2015 was 8 years ago and it was still happening to that store when I left the company and I was working at a $90 million store in 2016, which was 7 years ago, well 6.5 technically, and it was the same CEO then as it is now. I doubt that things have changed all that much in terms of the DCs dumping pallets where it's convenient to do so even if Target has changed some of its logistics processes, which it undoubtedly has.

Thanks for the snarky response though!
 
2015 was 8 years ago and it was still happening to that store when I left the company and I was working at a $90 million store in 2016, which was 7 years ago, well 6.5 technically, and it was the same CEO then as it is now. I doubt that things have changed all that much in terms of the DCs dumping pallets where it's convenient to do so even if Target has changed some of its logistics processes, which it undoubtedly has.

Thanks for the snarky response though!
Coming from a current $110mil store, it has changed, at least from what you think was/is happening. Just because you think a DC is targeting a specific store to fuck over, doesn't mean it's the DC making those calls, which you seem to be under the impression of. The DC does what Corporate orders them to do. They're not some independent store fucking machine doing whatever they want because you're only doing 90mil.
 
Coming from a current $110mil store, it has changed, at least from what you think was/is happening. Just because you think a DC is targeting a specific store to fuck over, doesn't mean it's the DC making those calls, which you seem to be under the impression of. The DC does what Corporate orders them to do. They're not some independent store fucking machine doing whatever they want because you're only doing 90mil.
It's almost as if you didn't read the entire first post.

Here, I'll quote myself for you.

I'm not saying that DCs create the manifests and pick and choose all of what they're sending but there's no shot they have ZERO decision making process on ANYTHING that gets sent out. I don't believe that for one second.
 
It's almost as if you didn't read the DC worker's post that you chose to point out.

The DC doesn't make those calls, Corporate does. Get it?

Again.

I'm not saying that DCs create the manifests and pick and choose all of what they're sending but there's no shot they have ZERO decision making process on ANYTHING that gets sent out. I don't believe that for one second.
 
So, you're just guessing on what you feel you think is/was happening.

Awesome. Thanks for clarifying.

I know for a fact that stores can force transfers and in some instances sweeps that have not been approved by the system. Why would DCs be different?

Thanks for being such a great poster!

The idea that 100%... Not 99.9%, but 100% of items leaving the DC are all generated by the system and nobody in the DC has any say about any piece of product leaving the building ever and it's all completely system driven is absolute bullshit.
 
So, you're just guessing on what you feel you think is/was happening.

Awesome. Thanks for clarifying.
That's exactly what they're doing. Making the same dumb baseless claims so many "smart" workers in the stores do. And I say this as someone who worked in the stores for years in the slowest store in their district
 
I know for a fact that stores can force transfers and in some instances sweeps that have not been approved by the system. Why would DCs be different?

Thanks for being such a great poster!

The idea that 100%... Not 99.9%, but 100% of items leaving the DC are all generated by the system and nobody in the DC has any say about any piece of product leaving the building ever and it's all completely system driven is absolute bullshit.
My guy. It is system driven. That 0.1% that we get to choose to send out is the equivalent of about 10-15 breakpacks of assortment freight. Which is only sent to the highest volume stores. Like top 8 volume stores per DC

Even when we breaking capacity limits we had to wait for an AER label drop from corporate to send out additional freight.
 
That's exactly what they're doing. Making the same dumb baseless claims so many "smart" workers in the stores do. And I say this as someone who worked in the stores for years in the slowest store in their district
I mean, I get mad at the DC when we get sent a bunch of crap that I know is going to sit in the steel until we can sweep it back, but I know it's not the DC's decision.

Corporate sees a surplus of unused steel in the backroom, and goes, "Hey, storage space until they send it back. Send it!"
 
I mean, I get mad at the DC when we get sent a bunch of crap that I know is going to sit in the steel until we can sweep it back, but I know it's not the DC's decision.

Corporate sees a surplus of unused steel in the backroom, and goes, "Hey, storage space until they send it back. Send it!"
Exactly. We spend more time preventing that stuff from getting sent unnecessarily to you guys than sending it. Like I remember stopping outbound from sending a pipo pallet of unsweetened apple sauce to a store. Like 350 boxes of Halloween apple sauce

The whole fantasy of us choosing to do this is hilarious. If I could send you all stuff everyone would be getting 100 pallets of Sterlite per truck lol
 
I dont know what these guys are smoking but I work at that DC in Georgia and I can say for fact that I would purposefully hand select pallets of product that I knew would sell slowly and place them on the back end of low volume stores trailers.
 
Exactly. We spend more time preventing that stuff from getting sent unnecessarily to you guys than sending it. Like I remember stopping outbound from sending a pipo pallet of unsweetened apple sauce to a store. Like 350 boxes of Halloween apple sauce

The whole fantasy of us choosing to do this is hilarious. If I could send you all stuff everyone would be getting 100 pallets of Sterlite per truck lol
Funny story.

We got a 45' trailer that was 3/4 filled with plastic furniture when our backroom had tons of space.

We ended up sweeping prolly half a trailer back a month or so later.

Edit: They did warn us it was coming though because they needed our storage space.
 
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