Peter Pavlakidis

In September 2011, Target announced that it would be acquiring up-to 220 Zellers
stores in Canada from the Hudson’s Bay Company. Since then, it went on to acquire 189 Zellers store leaseholds and is opening just 133 Target stores by the end of 2014. The factors which contributed to its selection process are the focus for this paper. The acquisition method of entry that was used to enter the Canadian retail landscape limited Target to select from a finitelist of Zellers stores, thus the site selection process will reflect that reality. The aim of this paper was to reconstruct Target’s location strategy for Canada by using what is known about its selections to ‘reverse engineer’ the factors or criteria that were important in its decision. Furthermore, since Zellers and Target are different brands that ultimately carry different products, an assumption was made that Target’s customer base would also be different. Given this, Target would have placed less emphasis on the Zellers store and customer data. In addition, the acquisition of sales and customer data for this analysis would have been difficult, thus the site selection approaches that were used did not require such data. The approaches used in this analysis were the ratio and decision tree methods. The aim of this research was to determine whether or not site selection rules could be established without the use of customer and sales data. If successful, other international retailers seeking to expand into Canada can use the techniques defined here to evaluate potential sites in the host country. This may also be appropriate for retailers who want to learn more about their competition, by helping them identify the factors that are important to them.