Target opens 11th sortation center – here's where
Target Corp. continues expanding its next-day delivery infrastructure.
In an email to Chain Store Age, Target announced it has grown its supply chain footprint by opening its 11th sortation center in Detroit. The discount giant piloted the concept — which streamlines the process of fulfilling and delivering online orders, removing the sorting process from the backroom of stores — in April 2021, with a pilot in its Minneapolis hometown.
Target says the center will bring its next-day delivery offering to more than three million consumers across the Detroit area. The facility is part of the retailer’s larger "stores as hubs" strategy which enables it to fulfill online orders from local stores.
The sortation center will retrieve packages daily from 30 to 40 local stores and sort, batch and route them for delivery to local neighborhoods by a local delivery driver or a third-party carrier. The retailer says that up to 90% of items ordered on Target.com before noon will be delivered next day.
Since the start of its sortation center operations, Target says the facilities have helped to increase the number of orders delivered to customers the next day by more than 150%,
In February 2023, the company revealed plans to spend $100 million to expand the network to more than 15 facilities by the end of 2026. In 2025 and beyond, Target intends to invest $3.5 to $5.5 billion per year to deepen capabilities across the business, including its supply chain network.
"Sortation centers are an important piece of the strategy here at Target, and we’re excited to continue testing and learning along the way," the retailer said in a fact sheet.
In early 2024, Target announced it will open 300 new stores in the next decade, and it will expand its supply chain to meet that growth with several new facilities currently in the pipeline. As it grows the sortation center network, Target anticipates creating hundreds of additional jobs in local metro areas.
[READ MORE: Target to open 300 stores over next decade]
Target tackles last mile delivery
Looking to speed up delivery even further, in June 2023 the retailer opened its first “Target Last Mile Delivery” extension facility, in Smyrna, Ga. The hub receives local, pre-sorted packages from Target’s Atlanta sortation center and stages them for pickup and next-day delivery by drivers on the Shipt platform to additional neighborhoods.
Built at what Target says is a fraction of the cost of a full-size sortation center, the company has brought Target Last Mile Delivery extensions to all its sortation center facilities. By leveraging its TLMD capabilities, Target estimates it is saving more than $30 million annually in last mile delivery costs, while speeding up customer delivery.
Larger capacity vehicles
In 2022,Target began testing the use of larger capacity vehicles, in partnership with its wholly-owned, independent online delivery subsidiary Shipt, in an effort to increase its capability to deliver its fastest delivery speeds at lower costs to more customers.
Today, drivers can leverage large-capacity vehicles to deliver along larger routes, with plans to test standardized vans in the future.
