On Target

It seems you can't open a newspaper without coming across a story where someone's bad-mouthing Wal-Mart for something—what they pay their employees, who they employ or how they treat them, their attitude towards their suppliers, or where they build their stores or how those stores affect Main Street USA's retail business districts. For most of our readers, it's that last part, the part about Main Street USA, that's most troubling. When the world's largest retailer sets up shop in the bucolic, amber-waves-of-grain outskirts of your town in its often intimidating, large-scale way, there's going to be trouble ahead for every store still clustered quaintly around the village green's post office, barber shop and ice cream parlor. That is, of course, if you buy into the fear.

Somehow, despite its enormous size, there's something laughable about Wal-Mart. Its shopping experience is one step up from a trip to the DMV when it comes to merchandising and customer service (at least once you're past the red vested senior citizens who greet you at door, my feelings for which are always an uncomfortable mix of “look how cute” and “I'd better start putting more in the 401K”). By and large, I find it hard to be cowed by a retailer whose stores typically look like a pack of dogs just got through rifling the merchandise in search of hidden bones. I still can't figure out how the company became so big, except to think that there really are a lot more people in America (and the world—except Germany, apparently) for whom price will trump just about any other aspect of the buying process. It's for just that reason that I have no problem with people shopping at Wal-Mart and don't begrudge the company its success. For too many people, Wal-Mart is as close as its customers are going to get to the trappings of what society tells us we need to have to be considered a success. I know that pressure every time I wander into certain stores, too—who doesn't leave Best Buy with the dull-but-persistent-lust for a flat-panel plasma TV?

I don't think it's far from the truth to say that for some, unfortunately, flat-panel plasma TVs aren't going to happen anytime soon and that the next step up on the retail pecking order for them isn't Bloomingdale's or Tiffany or FAO Schwarz, it's Target. Target's marketers will tell you it's the coolest big box on the block and they've been pretty effective at getting the rest of America to believe it. To shop “Tar-jhay” is aspirational. And so, frankly, is shopping at the average specialty toy store.

While it's rarely talked about in polite company, the elephant in the room when it comes to the ups—and, more lately, downs—of the specialty toy market, is the same thing that separates Wal-Mart from Target. That thing is money. Buying toys specifically at a specialty toy retailer—i.e., doing so after making a mindful choice to avoid heading to the local Toys “R” Us—implies an acceptance of certain principles, the main one being that you're prepared to pay more for something that's said to offer something more, be it more educational value, better-quality materials, or other advantages over a more mass-market product. In boom times, that can be a great selling point; it's a harder one to make when times are tough. And Target isn't helping matters. Through its increasing assortment of toys previously found only at specialty toy stores, it's doing what Wal-Mart or Toys “R” Us (despite it's purchase of Imaginarium) hasn't been able to do—make a trip to the specialty toy store “not so special,” at least when it comes to product assortment. Despite all the Wal-Mart chatter, it's Target that's the biggest threat to the average specialty toy store's business. It makes that bulls-eye logo seem downright ominous; placed as it is not on Wal-Mart, but on you.