Hopkins and Wayson blog

What Target Canada got wrong, and why our rollouts don’t feel that way

Between 2013 and 2015, Target opened more than 130 stores across Canada and then walked away from the whole market.

Most of the post-mortems point at merchandising and supply chain, and those failures were real. Underneath them was a quieter problem that hit construction on day one. The prototype didn’t match the buildings.

Target moved into Canada mostly by taking over existing retail spaces instead of building new, so nearly every site needed a heavy retrofit. Ceiling heights were all over the map. Structural layouts didn’t line up, and loading and back-of-house conditions rarely matched the assumed model.

The prototype kept getting reworked to fit each building, instead of each building getting planned around a stable prototype. Once that flips, consistency stops being something you hold and turns into something you chase.

That’s a real failure. It is not the reality we work in. On the C-store, QSR, and grocery programs we build across the Mid-Atlantic, roughly eight of ten sites fall inside the prototype’s parameters.

That predictability isn’t luck, and the prototype isn’t magic. It’s what happens when the sites get picked to fit a mature format, and someone who has built dozens of these reads the drawings early.

Target’s problem was scale without that discipline. Ours is a narrower and more useful problem: the two sites in ten that won’t behave.

Where the two in ten hide

Most of our sites are predictable, and that’s the point of a good prototype. The exceptions don’t announce themselves. A site looks normal until you read the details against the drawing. A few things tell us early which one we’re looking at.

A retrofit or an acquired space instead of a ground-up pad. When a brand takes over an existing building, the assumptions behind the prototype stop holding. Ceiling heights, column spacing, and back-of-house conditions were set for a store that isn’t this one. That is the water Target was swimming in across Canada, and it’s the clearest sign a site is going to need more than a standard set.

A jurisdiction we haven’t built in lately. A detail that clears review in one county can get kicked back a county or a state over. Fire separation, accessibility, stormwater, inspector expectations. They vary more than a national prototype set plans for. On our footprint, we usually know the local read before the drawings go in, so the exception is often the site sitting in a jurisdiction that reads it differently.

A format that’s moving faster than the drawings. C-store and QSR layouts are changing quickly right now. Foodservice keeps expanding, and seating, drive-thru, and mobile-order flow all put new demands on the space and systems. When the prototype is a version behind how the store now needs to run, the newest site is where that gap shows up first.

Where a builder earns their keep

We don’t fight the prototype, and on eight sites in ten there’s nothing to fight. The work is on the other two, and it happens before demo instead of during it. It looks like flagging the one detail that won’t survive a jurisdiction change and reading the assumptions that hold on paper but not on this specific parcel. It means helping the brand separate what has to stay identical from what can flex on this site without touching the brand standard.

We plan that variation on purpose, so the exception costs a few hours in preconstruction instead of a stack of RFIs after the store is open. That work happens early, or it happens expensively. There isn’t a third option.

What the brands who scale well do differently

The brands whose programs run clean don’t have easier sites than everyone else. They keep the prototype current and feed what the field tells them back into the drawings. They pilot a change before rolling it everywhere.

They let a region adjust without breaking the standard, and they bring their builder in early enough to catch the two-in-ten site while it’s still cheap to fix. The goal was never identical buildings. It’s predictable stores that open on time and run the way they were meant to.

The takeaway

Prototypes work. On most of our sites they work quietly, which is exactly what a brand is paying for. The risk isn’t that the model is fragile. It’s the occasional site that doesn’t fit the model and gets treated like it does.

Target scaled without checking that gap on any site. The programs we build stay predictable because someone checks it on every one, and because the rare exception gets named on the drawing board instead of found on the jobsite.