American megastores such as Walmart are often maligned for their aggressive business expansion and homogenization of local marketplaces. This is an issue again this year as discount retail giant Target opens stores across Canada.<\/p>\n
Many Canadians feel some resentment at yet another big-box corporate invasion of our retail space, bringing with it some echoes of Walmart\u2019s move here in 1994. Walmart\u2019s strategy, which included taking over Woolco stores in Canada, turned out to be a huge industry game-changer, sparking major debate over the local side effects.<\/p>\n
As far as having another big American retailer here, the key is competition, and competition is good for consumers. For example, Walmart moved quickly to lower prices to coincide with Target\u2019s opening. For those who don\u2019t have much spare cash, students especially, this means more affordable options.<\/p>\n
We all know buying used is better and cheaper, but not every student has time to hunt through thrift shops for clothes and other household items. And you can end up leaving with more than you wanted: an apartment can only have so many macram\u017d hangings and coconut monkeys before\u00c9 well, ideally, it should have none at all. This is where the discount stores come in, and Target is known for having a focus on clothing and decor trends. This is good news for people who don\u2019t wish to play mix-and-match with yesteryear\u2019s fashions, but who also don\u2019t have a huge budget to play with.<\/p>\n
One of the big arguments against the big-box stores back in the \u201990s was that they choked out small retailers through unfair pricing tactics. This did happen with Walmart in a lot of small communities and caused backlash in both Canada and the United States. The loss of retail diversity also caused people to feel that they had fewer choices.<\/p>\n
However, the marketplace has changed since then, and both consumers and smaller retailers have adjusted to the ubiquitous mega-store presence. The big retailers are now battling each other, leaving a niche for the small stores as well as an emerging market for the people who prefer to buy local.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to lump a large corporate expansion into the who-needs-it category, but Target\u2019s move into Canada is bringing consumers what they want: better choices for bargain-hungry shoppers. Bring it on!<\/p>\n
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American megastores such as Walmart are often maligned for their aggressive business expansion and homogenization of local marketplaces. This is an issue again this year as discount retail giant Target opens stores across Canada. Many Canadians feel some resentment at yet another big-box corporate invasion of our retail space, bringing with it some echoes of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-views","category-july-17-2013"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7288"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7291,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7288\/revisions\/7291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}