Target Plots More City-Friendly Stores

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Target's planning to open 15 stores in the next two years, and nearly all of those new stores will be small Target outposts in urban areas. The retailer recently announced its store openings for 2016 and 2017, and it looks like it's veering away from the big box, superstore strategy for the moment.

As Gannett's Sioux Falls Business Journal notes, the majority of the new urban Target stores range from just 19,000 square feet to 45,000 square feet, compared to regular Target stores that range from 80,000 square feet to 160,000 square feet. The small stores will offer departments like apparel, home, tech, beauty, and groceries. Some of the stores will feature departments geared specifically toward urban dwellers, like home sections with a focus on dorm and apartment living.

"Guests in urban areas tend to travel great distances to get to a Target," the company's spokeswoman Kristy Welker told Philly.com. "We are bringing the store to them and meeting them where they are."

New, smaller-format Targets are headed to Long Beach, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Queens, Brookline, Chicago, Tribeca, Cupertino, and Chicago in 2016. More urban stores are slated to open in 2017 in Cambridge, LA, and Philadelphia. There’s only one Target store over 100,000 square feet scheduled to open this year, and that’s in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Even though these new Target stores are going to be in urban locations, they won't be named CityTarget or TargetExpress: the retailer rebranded all its stores in August to go by just "Target."