So, you’re a corporate employee at Target’s Minneapolis headquarters. It’s Thursday afternoon. You’re probably staring at a spreadsheet, thinking about what to pick up on your way home, when an email from the incoming CEO, Michael Fiddelke, lands in your inbox. The subject line is probably somethingodyne and corporate, like "An Update on Our Path Forward." You click. And then the floor drops out.
One anonymous employee described the feeling as "total panic." I bet. Imagine thousands of people, suddenly forced to spend the weekend frantically updating their LinkedIn profiles and trying to remember if their work was "essential." They’re all being asked to work from home next week, not for their convenience, but so the company can quietly deactivate keycards and send out the digital pink slips without causing a scene in the lobby.
Welcome to the future of Target. It looks a lot like the past.
Let's Translate the Memo, Shall We?
In his memo, Fiddelke, a 20-year company man who’s about to take the throne, dropped the kind of corporate poetry that makes my skin crawl. "The truth is, the complexity we’ve created over time has been holding us back," he wrote. "Too many layers and overlapping work have slowed decisions, making it harder to bring ideas to life."
Let me translate that for you. "Complexity" and "layers" are just five-dollar words for "middle managers." It’s code for a bloated corporate structure that got fat and happy during the boom times. Now that the numbers are in the toilet—four straight years of stagnant sales, a stock price that’s fallen 65% from its peak—it’s time to trim the fat. And offcourse, the people who get called "fat" are never the ones in the C-suite.
This isn’t some brilliant, innovative strategy. This is Corporate Restructuring 101. It’s like a ship that’s been sitting still for too long and is now covered in barnacles. A good captain would carefully scrape them off to make the ship seaworthy again. What Fiddelke is doing is just taking a sledgehammer to the hull and calling it "simplification." He’s not fixing the engine or charting a new course; he’s just lightening the load by throwing people overboard.
It's a bad plan. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a depressingly predictable, soul-crushing maneuver designed to give Wall Street a momentary sugar high. The memo claims this is a "necessary step in building the future of Target." But what kind of future are you building when your first major act is to terrify the very people you need to execute your vision? You can't "inspire" a workforce you've just sent into a state of total panic. It just ain't possible.
We've Seen This Movie Before
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. This is a rerun. Back in 2015, the last time Target did this, they cut about 3,100 jobs under then-CEO Brian Cornell. It was part of a big "restructuring" after the company’s disastrous exit from Canada and a massive data breach. The goal then, as it is now, was to become more "agile" and "efficient."
And here we are, a decade later, with a new CEO singing the exact same song from the exact same hymn sheet.
The press releases mention Fiddelke has a "3-Part Turnaround Plan" to get back to "profitable growth." But they're awfully quiet about what those three parts actually are. Is "Target to Cut 1,800 Corporate Jobs — First Layoffs Since 2015" Part One? What are Parts Two and Three? Shuffling the deck chairs and changing the font on the weekly sales reports? I’m genuinely asking. Because from where I’m sitting, this looks less like a plan and more like a panic move.
For four years, Target has been getting its lunch eaten by Walmart and Amazon. Its revenue has actually shrunk by $2.5 billion since 2023. You don’t need an MBA to see the problem. Customer traffic is down, and the competition is relentless. Target’s market cap is a piddling $43 billion. Walmart’s is $850 billion. Amazon’s is $2.38 trillion. They aren’t even in the same weight class anymore. And the big solution is to... cut some project managers in Minneapolis? Give me a break.
This whole thing reminds me of every pointless corporate meeting I’ve ever been forced to attend, where executives use words like "synergy" and "optimization" to avoid saying what they really mean. They talk about "simplifying layers," but what they’re really doing is admitting they have no new ideas. When you can’t figure out how to grow, you cut. It’s the only move they know. And the people who pay the price are always the ones who had nothing to do with the decisions that led to the mess in the first place. They’re just numbers on a spreadsheet that needed to be... simplified.
Maybe I'm just cynical. Maybe this is a brilliant strategic pivot that will unlock a new era of prosperity for the retailer. But when the first move from the new guy is the oldest, most painful trick in the corporate playbook, I’m not holding my breath.
So This Is 'Growth'?
Let's be brutally honest. This isn't a "turnaround plan." It's a bloodletting to appease shareholders. Firing 8% of your corporate staff doesn't magically fix four years of declining sales or make you more competitive against Amazon. It’s a short-term fix for a long-term disease. It buys the new CEO a quarter or two of good headlines about "cost-cutting," but it does nothing to solve the fundamental problem: people just aren't shopping at Target the way they used to. This isn't leadership; it's just math. And it's pathetic.
