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Canada is facing the biggest private-sector closure in recent history, and 17,600 Target workers will soon be out of a job. An employee of Target Canada is documenting the last days of work at the store during its liquidation.
Fixtures, furniture and equipment are marked with shocking pink stickers, including even the cashier stations reveal their going-out-of-business prices. Everything that can be grabbed is for sale. Locals and out-of-towners are gobbling up the remnants of a once-pleasant department store.
“Target Loves Canada,” the slogan that once hung from the ceiling is now replaced with cluster frightening posters listing discount amounts and a grotesque countdown of days left to shop in the store.
Shoppers ask the store employees how many more days until another discount is added? The complaint in the break room these days is the intense feeling created by the encroachment of products and hardware moving to the front of the store — the feeling of being pushed out the front doors. The red walls give the feeling of being eaten alive.
‘All that is left is blood and feathers,’ one shopper says. His loud comment is overheard by several workers, and while a few chuckle, others take in a deep breath.
A loud rumble catches my attention as a series of racks that used to display the popular Mossimo clothing brand travel past me and out the main doors. Shelves that once held Threshold are also pushed out of the building. The familiar Target tag line, “Expect More, Pay Less,” is cut in half.
Retail buyers swoop in like crows and snatch up the shiny bits expecting to pay less while at the same time, perhaps, expecting the workers in this burning inferno to be the same friendly folks. Only a few months earlier, our huddle got a pep talk: the theme was sustainability. The Leader on Duty spoke of Target Canada’s gallant effort to continually make improvements and operate their business more efficiently, to offer more sustainable products and provide resources to help the guests and us, the workers, live sustainable lives. That philosophy is now crippled and has harmed a great many workers, as though they had been thrown through broken glass.
The injured appear faithfully for shifts they are called in to work. Department managers are heroic in their efforts to accommodate the needs of the employees. It is not Target Canada, nor the bankruptcy companies, who control the attitude of the ‘mutilated’ employees during the takedown of the department store — it is the people themselves.
Each person should be rewarded for being distinctively duty-bound. While at work, even while shuffling to and fro with sore feet, headaches, and depression, some laugh contagiously, others dance in the aisles and all perform their chores to the best of their abilities. We don’t need Target in our lives to sustain.
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