Target layoffs hit almost all corners of the business, from merchants to engineers

Employees of the Minneapolis-based retailer were informed Tuesday whether or not their positions had been affected. The company decided to cut around 1,000 team members and to not fill an additional 800 open roles, a Target spokesperson confirmed to Modern Retail. Those impacted will continue to receive pay and benefits until Jan. 3, in addition to severance packages.

The move is expected to have a noticeable impact on the workloads and sentiment of those who remain with the company. It will also leave hundreds of people — some had been with the company for decades — without work at the tail end of an economically challenging year. Now, Target faces the tall task of rebuilding morale at a time when the company has faced macroeconomic and geopolitical hurdles, criticism over its pullback of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, several underwhelming quarters, and an expectation of a low-single digit decline in sales this fiscal year.

The Target spokesperson said the change impacted leadership roles at about three times the rate of individual contributors. Minneapolis was home to many of the affected workers, though some in other cities and in India were also laid off. No roles in stores or warehouses were affected, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson declined to share exact numbers on how many employees in each city lost their jobs, though the company filed two Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) letters with the state of Minnesota detailing at least 500 jobs lost in downtown Minneapolis and 287 at its Brooklyn Park offices.

Just a few examples of the 1,000 people leaving the company, according to their profiles, include a senior product manager who had worked on collaboration tools for employees; a product development scientist who had worked on pet and health products; recruiters who helped staff distribution centers; and a private-label portfolio manager who previously worked as a buyer of products aimed at LGBTQIA+ consumers.

Losing colleagues, foundational talent

A deluge of LinkedIn posts in the days following the announcements underscored how widespread the layoffs were, and how deeply it cut to the core of a tight-knit business community. Target is one of the largest employers in the state of Minnesota, with a large network of alumni in the area.

Remaining workers hyped up their now former colleagues and lamented what the layoffs would do to their workloads, while some people who were impacted during Target’s last mass round of layoffs in 2015 gave advice to this new round of job seekers.

“There’s this strange mix of gratitude and heaviness that comes with staying while others go,” Camilo Zapata, a senior manager of site merchandising for beauty who is remaining with the company, wrote on LinkedIn. “For those of us still here, the road ahead will bring new challenges, bigger scopes, and the responsibility to rebuild stability for our teams.”

Leaders at the company wrote about how they had lost key support figures on their teams.

“You can’t downsize this hard and willy-nilly without that work being pushed on others,” one laid-off employee told Modern Retail on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation. “My sister teams are really upset I was let go, as well as [further] teams I partnered with.”

Similarly, Shelbi Craig, senior market research and insights analyst for Roundel, Target’s retail media business, wrote on LinkedIn about two analysts on her team who lost their jobs. One had only been there for a few months, and the other had been in her role for more than two years.

“Losing two people who directly supported my work is a huge shift,” Craig wrote. “I’m deeply grateful to still have a job and a steady income in such a challenging job market, but I also feel the weight of what this means — both for those who are facing uncertainty and for those of us feeling the ripple effects of losing close teammates.”

Target says this is not about cutting costs

A Target spokesperson said the company did not pursue the layoffs to cut costs and instead meant to create a more agile organization that can make faster decisions.

“The complexity we’ve created over time has been holding us back,” Michael Fiddelke, Target’s chief operating officer and incoming CEO, told employees in an email the company provided to Modern Retail. “Too many layers and overlapping work have slowed decisions, making it harder to bring ideas to life.”

However, Truist analyst Scot Ciccarelli estimated that the savings from the cuts could come in at around $90 million to $100 million, according to MarketWatch. To be sure, this was based on salaries from Glassdoor and Salary.com that said the average Target corporate salary ran around $90,000 to $100,000.

Bryan Gildenberg, founder and CEO of Confluencer Commerce — who has been monitoring retail companies for decades — said moving to not fill whichever jobs are open is typically a cost-cutting measure rather than one of boosting efficiency. He believes this could be a move to simply improve the company’s financial picture after several underwhelming quarters.

“You’re not going to get the most strategic force reduction if you’re just simply trying to not hire jobs that are unhired,” Gildenberg said. “I understand what Target’s trying to say, which is that we are trying to get faster and leaner and this is a way to do that, but it also is reasonably obvious that Target’s got economic pressures on it that it needs to sort out.”

In an analyst note, David Bellinger, a director and senior analyst for Mizuho Securities who covers consumer and e-commerce companies, said his firm expects more restructuring activity from Target in the months following the busy holiday period. He said the move is “a difficult first of many steps as [Target] moves from its mediocre era into its turnaround era.”

“Adjusting our structure is one part of the work ahead of us,” Fiddelke wrote in his message to staff, then alluding to the same three goals he outlined in August after being named the company’s next CEO. “It will also require new behaviors and sharper priorities that strengthen our retail leadership in style and design and enable faster execution so we can lead with merchandising authority; elevate the guest experience with every interaction; and accelerate technology to enable our team and delight our guests.”

Dark days in Minneapolis

Over the coming months, the layoffs will release hundreds of Target employees, largely based in Minneapolis, into the job market.

Target is not the only major employer making major changes that impact the region. Paul DeBettignies, founder of Launch Hiring, said he has also spoken with Minneapolis-area workers who were just let go from Amazon and agriculture company Cargill this week.

“I’m concerned about the already unemployed folks,” he said. “It just does not help having another pool of — I don’t like to use the word competition, but it’s what it is.”

Ted Chalupsky, founder and CEO of The Right Staff, a staffing and recruiting company in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, said his firm is now starting to hear from Target workers who have been laid off and expects to hear from more in the coming weeks.

He said that while it’s never a good time to lose a position, he thinks those who have been laid off this month are in a better boat than they would have been had they been in the market a year or two ago.

“We’re seeing the job market starting to pick up again,” Chalupsky said, adding that federal interest rate cuts and increased clarity around tariffs have helped make employers more optimistic. “The word that we’re getting back, just in general, from our clientele is that we’re going to see a pickup in hiring over the next two quarters in this market.”

Chalupsky said that in 2015, when Target laid off 1,700 people and left 1,400 positions unfilled, many ended up at smaller or mid-sized companies in the region instead of large corporations. He expects the same trend within this round of layoffs.

“They ended up actually in better positions,” Chalupsky said. “Many comments that we heard back from these different candidates [were] basically, ‘Gee, if I’d known about this company or this opportunity, I probably would have made this move a long time ago.'”

The layoffs come after Target in September began requiring workers to return to its headquarters office three days a week. For some, that means they had to move or at least adopt new routines shortly before being laid off.

“As a citizen in the region, I’m kind of annoyed that they would have brought everybody back after Labor Day, and then now have done this,” DeBettignies said.

He added that he expects these changes, combined with the controversy around the DEI pullback, to depress worker sentiment at the company and lead to additional departures once the job market heats up a bit more.

“I wonder what [Target’s] Glassdoor is going to look like in about 60 days,” DeBettignies said. “It’s not going to be pretty.”