Target is reportedly shutting down not one but two long-term projects even before they started, and it's because of a holiday season that didn't go so well.
Called Store of the Future and Goldfish, these two ventures seem to be more or less designed to go head-to-head with Amazon, particularly against its no-checkout Go stores and online retail platform.
Store Of The Future Now A Store Of The Past
According to Recode's report, the team designated to build the Store of the Future already had a prototype underway, and it was supposed to open this year, which made the decision to end it somewhat unexpected. It also mentions that the CEO of Target, Brian Cornell, was looking forward to the project, making the occurrence even more baffling.
If it were indeed completed, the Store of the Future wouldn't have had aisles like a traditional store but a sort of showroom, filled with robots that are programmed to gather items and deliver them to the customers at checkout.
More than that, Target was also purportedly going to provide spaces for community meetups and the retailer's e-commerce offerings.
Goldfish Termination Was Sudden
As mentioned earlier, the other project that got discarded is Goldfish. Sources say that it would have been an online marketplace that's open to other third-party retailers to sell products, which could have been considered as Target's answer to Amazon.
The team behind Goldfish was manned by West Stringfellow, a former PayPal exec, and according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, they were let go at a time when Stringfellow had moved from Minneapolis to San Francisco to kick things off sometime in March.
Target's Response Outlines Plans Moving Forward
Target has already responded to the matter at hand and had this to say:
"At Target, we regularly pause to evaluate our business and have to make tough choices about where our company is best served to invest our time and resources. We recently made some changes to the innovation portfolio to refocus our efforts on supporting our core business, both in stores and online, and delivering against our strategic priorities," Target says (via Minneapolis Star Tribune), noting that it still eyes innovation in "digital, technology, supply chain, and merchandising."
Cornell is scheduled to present the company's plans on Feb. 28 in New York at an investors meeting.
To sum things up, Target seems to have placed innovative projects such as the Store of the Future and Goldfish on the back burner to concentrate on the company's core business, but it does have plans to push the envelope for projects similar to the two in the foreseeable future.
Now, scrapping both of these projects is puzzling because it's now unclear what exactly Target has in mind to restart growth, especially when competitors such as Amazon are taking steps toward reshaping the retail industry.
If you have an opinion regarding the retailer's moves, feel free to sound off in the comments section below and let us know.
