A good burger always starts with a good bun. The one you eat and the one you photograph look pretty much the same. But that’s where the similarities end.
When cooking meat for consumption, the goal is making sure it’s cooked all the way through.
But the goal when you’re photographing it is to get some nice looking grill marks with a special tool.
The meat patty you eat is simply placed on the bun, but the burger you photograph has an extra piece between the meat and the bun to give it a little lift.
And the condiments aren’t squirted on for food styling. Instead, they are carefully syringed into place around the edges, as if oozing out of the burger.
Target is giving up on Canada. The retailer announced today that it would close all 133 of its stores north of the border, which have been losing money since it arrived in the country less than two years ago, boldly venturing into its first international expansion.
By all accounts, the adventure has been an unmitigated disaster—a story of a company trying to accomplish too much, too fast, with too little thought. Target opened 124 stores at once in 2013. Rather than build its own real estate, it purchased leases on buildings that had belonged to Zellers, a “dying low-end retailer,” as Fortuneputs it, whose locations were “dumpy, poorly configured for Target’s big-box layout, and were in areas not frequented by the middle class customers Target covets.”
But that wasn’t the real killer. Because it revved up so quickly, the company never had time to develop a working supply chain in Canada, which left its stores short on merchandise and full of empty shelves. After the market researchers Belus Capital Advisors publishedpictures of the barren aisles, it led to headlines like this from DailyMail.com:
Here’s a taste of what Target’s Canada stores looked like. Notice something missing?
Nobody likes shopping in a picked-over retail ruin. But, there wasn’t much individual stores could do to improve their appearances. As a former Target employee explained in an email to Gawker, there was no way for the Canadian stores to tell distribution centers what items they needed each day. If they were out of eggs, or milk, or shirts, they had to hope those things would show up on a truck full of mystery merchandise that arrived each morning. Meanwhile, the company’s rulebook prevented employees from filling the barren shelves with whatever else they had on hand. The end result: understocked, uninviting stores that couldn’t even compete on price with Walmart, which began offering discounts to undercut its rival. Target seems to have realized that with all the damage already done, it wasn’t going to recover.
A couple of years ago, union-busting retail monster Target expanded into Canada in what they thought would be a bold new phase of international domination. It was not.
Today, the company announced that it is shutting down all 133 of its Canadian stores, laying off more than 17,000 employees, and writing off the whole god damn project as an enormous, outlandish, multibillion-dollar failure.
What went wrong? Target’s CEO said only that “After a thorough review of our Canadian performance and careful consideration of the implications of all options, we were unable to find a realistic scenario that would get Target Canada to profitability until at least 2021.” For a more illuminating perspective, please re-read this email sent to us by a Target Canada insider last year, detailing the company’s botched effort to graft its American business plan onto a new country.
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