A Brief Comment from Doug Draper
I’ll confess that I have never been a fan of Target stores, not even in the United States where Target rose and apparently still reigns as one of the major profit-making players in the big box retail business.
The Target brand failed in Canada and more than 17,000 low-paid Canadian workers are paying for it – but not the CEO.
Yet with all the news this winter of Target’s disastrous foray into Canada – after such a grandoise launch less than two years ago – and all of the “Closing! Total Liquidation” signs being hung at each and every Target outlet across the Great White North this February 2015, I could not help but take a brief walk through one of those doomed outlets at the Pen Centre Mall in St. Catharines.
This liquidation sale, so sad as it seemed to attract fewer prospective buyers, proportionally, than a yard sale you or I might stage on a Sunday afternoon, made one wonder if Target’s boardroom broncos ever knew what they were doing in the first place. Some of the floor employees in the St. Catharines store – among the 17,600 losing their jobs at Target stores across Canada – were keeping their dhins up as they stamped more discount stickers on whatever merchandise was left.
And here is the sad punchline.
The 17,000 low-income, frontline workers from Target’s closing retail outlets in Niagara, Ontario and from coast to coast across Niagara, will reportedly receive less in , in severance or walk-away pay and benefits than the Canadian CEO for Target who oversaw a launch of the retail giant into this country that turned into the business venture equivalent of ‘Custer’s Last Stand’
According to reports from the CBC, Fortune Magazine and other media, ex-Canadian Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel, who was in charge of the retail chain’s debacle in this country until he was let go last May, 2014, received a package, including stock options and other benefits, totalling $61 million U.S.
The collective “employee trust” package for all of Target’s Canadian workers, totalled $56 million U.S.
Apparently there is no price to pay for failure among those at the top of the corporate foodchain. Only those who worked on the ground pay with the loss of their job and fighting to find another one at the lower end of the wage scale.
This is just of one more of the countless recent examples of why there is such a growing income gap between the top one per cent and the rest of us struggling to get by.
Where is the Occupy Movement of a few years back, that gathered with such self-proclaimed resolve in what is left of our public spaces across North America to protest this growing gap between a billion and trillion dollar few and the rest of us when we need it?
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