In stark contrast to Amazon, which has announced that it will hire an additional 100,000 workers for the holiday season, Target said on Wednesday that it is set to close 13 struggling stores on Jan. 30 due to the branches' poor performance.
Though quite a radical decision, a spokeswoman from Target said "the decision to close the stores was not made lightly." "Typically, a store is closed as a result of seeing several years of decreasing profitability," she said, according to CNN Money.
The spokeswoman did not give specific reasons for the closings, but she stressed that the closings are all about the performance of the individual stores, "not about the broader company in any way," reported The Huffington Post.
Employees who are "eligible" will be given the opportunity to transfer to another location, she said. Currently, Target as 1,799 U.S. stores.
Brick-and-mortar enterprises like Target have been losing ground to online markets like Amazon, which have started offering products in their online stores that are typically bought in physical locations. Earlier this year, Target laid off about 2,000 professional employees in a series of workforce reductions. Last January, the company also closed all 133 of its stores in Canada after failing to make enough revenue there.
