Reinventing the customer experience

First it was discount stores, and then came supercenters and the Internet. Target competes with Walmart at every turn, and now the companies are set to square off in a new format frontier. Target executives in late January told financial analysts one aspect of the company’s growth strategy involved development of a small-format store that could be used to penetrate densely populated markets. They didn’t offer a lot of detail other than to define small as somewhere between 60,000-sq.-ft. and 100,000-sq-ft. and indicate the first such stores would open in the next several years.

Walmart is sure to be watching closely whatever format Target puts on the street, as its future growth plans also call for an increased emphasis on smaller stores of an unspecified size. Walmart indicated its seriousness last week when a desire to accelerate speed to market with new formats was listed among the reasons why a new structure was created to align customer experience and store planning teams.