As Target struggles to retain its customers, rivals like Walmart are making gains. The Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Nassauer explains what’s behind this retail shift. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Empty shopping carts at a Target store in Chicago. Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by.
Welcome to the Target Corporation third quarter earnings release conference call.
The next 68 minutes of that call in November were a mess.
Oh sure, Target CEO talked about having confidence in our proven long term strategy, but the company's earnings had missed their mark.
Their Target, if you will.
Americans seem to have fallen out of love with Target.
The they just haven't seen their sales, you know, bounce back at all from sort of the post Covid era.
But why?
Well, on another November earnings call just across town, not literally, Walmart CEO Doug McMillan was gloating.
All three segments of our business performed well.
Sales for Walmart International grew 12.4% in constant currency.
Coming up on Today explained retail wars how Walmart ate into Target's business.
2025 is going to be a huge year for the tech industry.
AI is either going to take over or maybe kind of start to go away.
Regulation is going to continue and change the tech industry, or maybe a new president is going to change his mind about how all that is supposed to work.
We're going to get new gadgets and new apps and new social platforms competing for our time and attention and new information about what it means to be a person on the Internet and how we should be thinking about that.
We have no idea what's coming next year, but on the Vergecast this month we've decided to speculate wildly.
Anyway, we're spending our time trying to figure out what's coming next year, what isn't, and what it all means.
All that on the Vergecast presented by Polestar.
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