See Correction/Clarification at the end of this article.
Target Corp. said Tuesday it would expand its toy departments at hundreds of stores nationwide and improve its online toy-buying experience, the latest moves by the company to seize the holiday-presents market put in play by the bankruptcy of Toys R Us.
Minneapolis-based Target (NYSE: TGT) outlined its plans on its company blog, promising to turn over an additional 250,000 square feet of space to its toy departments ahead of the holiday season — its first without Toys R Us as a competitor. That space is divided among 500 stores, so about 500 square feet per store. A typical Target store is 135,000 square feet, so you're talking maybe a couple extra aisles.
It's not clear exactly where the space would come from, though in many Targets the sporting-goods department is next to toys, so yoga mats and baseball gloves may lose some room to Legos.
The retailer is going further in 100 of its remodeled stores, with larger displays and interactive features. It's also moving the kids' books aisle next to the toy department. Target typically grouped books with other media like movies and music. This isn't a fourth-quarter-only thing, apparently; Target tells CNBC that the changes will be "absolutely permanent."
Target is also stepping up efforts to get people into these bigger departments, hosting many more toy-testing events and visits from fictional characters than in previous years. This is a riff on one of the oldest tricks in the holiday-shopping playbook, of course (the first department store Santa Claus dates to the 1890s), just updated for the PAW Patrol generation.
And it's touting a rollout of 2,500 new and exclusive toys for the season, something it first announced in September.
Finally, the retailer is distributing 22 million gift catalogs in homes and stores; buyers can scan items in the catalog with Target's smartphone app and be taken to the retailer's e-commerce site.
Target has been preparing all these moves for months, spying an opportunity as rival Toys R Us failed over the summer. "We are going to make sure we are taking more than our fair share of that market share," CEO Brian Cornell said at the time.
These numbers were found in both companies' 10-K filings.
But other retailers aren't standing still, either. Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart is also expanding the floor space given over to its toy departments and rolling out its own line of exclusive items. And Party City, not normally a toy retailer, will open dozens of "Toy City" pop-up stores where it can find attractive leases. And Amazon.com Inc. has already captured plenty of consumer mindshare — if not yet marketshare, according to one survey.
Correction/Clarification
An earlier version of this story incorrectly estimated the amount of square footage per store given over to the larger toy departments.
