Comment by Kye
4 years ago
See: Target's botched move into Canada. They basically copied everything they did in the US. This was compounded by an optimistic purchase of another company's locations to expand into. They bombed the project's runway on that and couldn't afford to keep it going while they sorted out all the problems resulting from Canada revealing all the flaws in their US systems.
As a Canadian whose partner was initially very excited about the Target launch, what killed it for her/us was primarily the logistics issues— you'd go into the store and like 20% of the shelves would be empty including everything that was supposed to be on markdown, and even some of the stuff that was there wouldn't scan properly at the till.
But apart from that, I think we got the impression that there were some market positioning issues too. Like, in the US, Wal-Mart has a reputation for being the absolute cheapest, so Target being the "step up" option is a pretty reasonable place to be. Whereas in Canada, Wal-Mart was already occupying that step-up space (relative to discount department stores like Giant Tiger and the old Zellers locations that Target Canada bought up), and those overseeing the Target push hadn't really committed on whether they wanted to fight Wal-Mart directly for that space, or try to go a level further up and take on the "nice" department stores like the Bay and Sears.
Neither option was great, given that Wal-Mart was well-entrenched and the nice department stores having been dying for decades anyway. But not choosing a path at all is often worse than either of two bad options might have been if they'd at least been fully committed-to.
That wiki article makes it sound like they did change something compared to the US stores; prices went up. Canadian customers knew that from previously crossing the border to US Target stores and subsequently stopped going pretty much immediately after launch.
I believe part of the reason is they completely changed their enterprise resource planning & supply chain software. There were a LOT of changes, and yet not enough - not accounting for Canadian price sensitivity and the distances/warehousing difference.
This is a fascinating read I bookmarked at the time :)
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...
I believe (but could be wrong) Home Depot did essentially the same thing - used Canadian market as test bed for SAP, except they already had an established stable presence here.