Target Corporation

Target Corporation is an American big box department store chain headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the eighth largest retailer in the United States, and a component of the S&P 500 Index. Target established itself as the discount division of the Dayton’s Company of Minneapolis in 1962. It began expanding the store nationwide in the 1980s (as part of the Dayton-Hudson Corporation), and introduced new store formats under the Target brand in the 1990s. The company has found success as a cheap-chic player in the industry. The parent company was renamed Target Corporation in 2000, and divested itself of its last department store chains in 2004. It suffered from a massive, highly publicized security breach of customer credit card data and the failure of its short-lived Target Canada subsidiary in the early 2010s, but experienced revitalized success with its expansion in urban markets within the United States.

As of 2021, Target operates 1,926 stores throughout the United States, and is ranked number 37 on the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations by total revenue. Their retail formats include the discount store Target, the hypermarket SuperTarget, and “small-format” stores previously named CityTarget and TargetExpress before being consolidated under the Target branding.