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Epic Economist, 10/25/23
"Target Is Collapsing Faster Than You
Think As Mass Store Closings Begin"
"According to new reports, many Americans are about to lose their local Target stores. Every month, more Target store closings are being announced as the company faces one of its biggest crises since it was founded six decades ago. The retail chain is in a very poor financial shape, with sales on pace to be the worst they have ever been, one expert said. Revenue growth is also going down while its stock plunged to the lowest level since 2020. And even though the chain is blaming retail theft as the reason why even more stores are going to be shuttered this week, Bloomberg exposed that there’s a somberer reason behind the closures. Target’s business is crumbling down, and the latest data will show you precisely what’s going on.
Mike Baker, D.A. Davidson Senior Research Analyst, forecasted that Target’s financial health is likely to deteriorate even further in Q4. “It's hard to know if the worst was last quarter or this quarter or what exactly is going to be. But we think we're close to the worst,” he said during an interview with Yahoo Finance.
In Q3, the outlook became even gloomier, with consumer traffic trends significantly worsening. Target’s most recent financial report showed that guest visits declined by 5% year-over-year. That big slump was the main factor behind a surprising 5% drop in comparable-store sales during the quarter. Although performance has been going from bad to worse for quite some time now, the company’s executives have continued to overstate Target’s profit potential in the past few months, filling investors with hopes, only to crash them down after new data is online.
Now, its total revenue of over $24.5 billion came lower than analysts’ forecasts by over $400 million. Worse, Target’s profitability lagged other retailers. Its forward enterprise value to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization ratio stood at minus 10.39% while Walmart has 3.75% and Costco has 8.53%.
One more time, the corporation cited retail shrink as one of the main drivers of the losses. But when Bloomberg and Fox News investigators looked at law enforcement dispatch data from stores around Portland, the numbers told a very different story. According to official data from several locations around Portland, all of the stores that are being closed this week have lower property delinquency rates than other stores in the area. That means the retail giant is not eliminating the locations based on real theft risk as it said it was.
On Tuesday, the discounter announced it is closing three stores in the Bay Area for the same alleged reason. At the same time, lots of customers were surprised to find out that the oldest Target store in Manhattan would go out of business this week. With data disproving the company's claim that incidents of shoplifting or robberies were the cause of the shutdowns, the expert suggests that organized retail theft has become a convenient cover for internal problems such as bloated inventories, heavy discounting, and employee theft.
Recent problems were only added on top of the company’s messy pile of failures. These headwinds have made Target one of the cheapest retail stocks in the U.S. In November, the company will report the rest of its Q3 results, and investors will certainly be watching that announcement closely for signs of further weaknesses. At some point, executives will not be able to continue to mask the retailer’s performance, and the dozens of store closings a week might escalate to hundreds when shareholders realize Target will never be the way it was before this downturn started."
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