MISCmedia for 11/20/00
The Bon Target

THERE'S FINALLY A TARGET STORE in Seattle. The chain had previously dotted the suburbs, but came no closer to town than Westwood Village, a strip mall on the cusp between West Seattle and White Center.

Now, the "hip" discount department store (which has encouraged its fans to use the faux-French designation "Tar-szhay") has set up shop in a new development across from Northgate--the historic "Mall That Started It All" where, 50 years ago, the then-parent company of the Bon Marche devised a centralized, all-enveloping shopping experience, separated by a giant moat of parking lots from the outside world.

In contrast, the new Northgate North development, where Target is, was planned in cooperation with city officials who wanted an "urban village" scheme--higher-density development, with leftover space for new residential units.

Therefore, the new Target's 80,000 square feet (the chain's standard store size) are cut up into two floors of a building that directly abuts the sidewalk (though you have to enter from the back, next to the five-story parking garage). Target's on the building's upper two floors. The ground floor's devoted to smaller chains with storefront entrances (not open yet). On the lower level: Best Buy, the electronics/appliance/CD chain that once ran a national TV ad promoting itself as the best place to catch up on that then-hot "Seattle Sound," even though it didn't have any outlets in the area at the time.

The building itself's done up in that currently popular retro-"industrial" style. Lotsa exposed framework and corrugated aluminum cladding give off a "busy" and quasi-friendly look, rather than the overpowering nothingness of big blank concrete walls.

The Target store was worth the wait, and suggests the chain should've built in-town sooner. While Kmart constructed its merchandising for suburban squares, and Wal-Mart was devised to be Small Town America's everything-for-everybody store, Target applied niche marketing (also known as "target marketing") to what had been a mass-marketing genre. Like Ikea, it sought out young-adult singles and new families with more style than cash. From shoes to lingerie, from kids' coats to tableware, from home-office furniture to home-entertainment centers, what Target's got is at least a little cooler (and not much costlier) than the stuff at the other big-box chains.

This strategy dates to the chain's origins. As the chain's website notes, it's the only national discount chain to have been started by "department store people, not dime store people." Specifically, it was started by Dayton Hudson Co., owners of Dayton's dept. store in Minneapolis (where Mary Tyler Moore flung her hat). Target has now become more important to Dayton Hudson than its collection of regional dept.-store chains; the parent company recently changed its official name to Target Corp. When family scion Mark Dayton won a U.S. Senate election this month, most commentators referred to him as "heir to the Target fortune."

Indeed, the brand's become so powerful that the company was able to run commercials earlier this year with rave DJs and hot-panted dancers cavorting around backdrops of the chain's bull's-eye logo, with no products being sold and the store's name not even mentioned.

TOMORROW: Another of our little fiction pieces.

IN OTHER NEWS: There's a movie out there this week with a supposed anti-materialism message, that has lots of merchandising tie-ins with Nabisco, Hasbro, Visa, the Post Office, and more. Here's a review, in Seussesque verse.

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