Posted on 03/14/2021 10:27:08 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Target Corporation, the eighth largest retailer in the United States, announced in an email to employees on Thursday that it will be leaving the City Center, its primary downtown Minneapolis location.
Article by Jon Miltimore from FEE.
Company officials cited improved remote work opportunities and less need for space as the drivers for the decision.
“In just one year we’ve proven that we can drive incredible results, together, from our kitchens and basements and living rooms,” said Melissa Kremer, executive vice president and leader of Target’s human resources operations.
Target, the largest employer in Minneapolis with some 8,500 corporate workers, says the 3,500 employees who work at the City Center will still have a “home base,” but it will be at another Minneapolis location or in the nearby suburb of Brooklyn Park.
On one hand, there is little reason to doubt Target’s explanation for abandoning its headquarters. Many anticipated that the pandemic would lead to a normalization of remote work.
“The future of work will be distributed,” Erica Brescia, the chief operating officer of Github, told the BBC last fall. “We’re going to see a big shift from office by default to remote by default.”
Part of that shift, it’s reasonable to assume, would be corporations moving away from high-end corporate real estate. Yet it also shouldn’t be forgotten (or ignored) that Target’s decision comes less than a year after Minneapolis suffered some of the worst riots in US history, prompted by the May 25 death of George Floyd.
The riots—which broke out after a video went viral showing police pinning Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, to the ground for nearly nine minutes before he died—caused an estimated $2 billion in damage.
Though Target made no mention of the riots in its announcement, last summer I noted that an abundance of evidence suggested that the economic damage of the riots would persist long after the wreckage had cleared.
“Economic research and basic economic theory indicate that local residents will suffer from myriad cascading consequences ranging from business flight, reduced capital investment, higher insurance costs, and lower property values. All of these effects will be especially hard on underprivileged communities,” I wrote.
That observation was prompted after a Minneapolis business owner announced he was leaving the city after he was forced to watch his business burn to the ground.
“The fire engine was just sitting there, but they wouldn’t do anything,” the business owner, Kris Wyrobek, told The Star Tribune.
Perhaps the most compelling data we have regarding the economic impact of riots come from a 2004 National Bureau of Economic Research paper authored by economists William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo. Examining census data from 1950 to 1980, their research concluded that the 1960s riots had a profound and pervasive negative impact on property values, particularly on black-owned properties.
“Using both city-level and household-level data, we find negative, persistent, and economically significant correlations between riot severity and black-owned property values,” wrote Collins and Margo. “[T]here was little or no rebound during the 1970s.”
Moreover, a separate 2004 study on the 1992 LA riots found that the riots accounted for a loss of economic activity that cost the city $3.8 billion in taxable sales and some $125 million in direct sales tax revenue.
Economist Victor Matheson, one of the authors of the study, noted it took more than a decade for economic activity to return to previous levels in the affected areas.
The takeaway is clear. Riots have a severe impact on capital investment and commercial decisions, and these impacts tend to hit the poor the hardest.
Despite the severe costs of riots, surveys show that both Democrats and Republicans increasingly see violence as a legitimate tool to oppose injustice.
Few trends in the US are more troubling than this one.
We'd do well to remember the words of MLK.
“In spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace,” Dr. King said. “It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” pic.twitter.com/L3mTnKz1ex
— Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) January 7, 2021
Throughout the violence of 2020, many struggled to condemn the riots that spread across the country following Floyd’s death. Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, expressed dismay that many were calling for peace amid the riots following Floyd’s death, even though his accused assailants were behind bars.
“It’s a familiar pattern: to call for peace and calm but direct it in the wrong places,” Garza told The New Yorker. “Why are we having this conversation about protest and property when a man’s life was extinguished before our eyes?”
“We don’t have time to finger-wag at protesters about property,” she continued. “That can be rebuilt. Target will reopen. The stores will reopen. That’s assured.”
Some civil rights leaders saw the folly in such thinking, including the late civil rights icon John Lewis.
“To the rioters here in Atlanta and across the country,” Lewis said. “I see you, and I hear you. I know your pain, your rage, your sense of despair and hopelessness. Justice has, indeed, been denied for far too long. Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way.”
Injustice is real. It should be opposed by all people acting in good faith. But Lewis, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before him, understood that violence only begets more violence.
Garza was correct that Target would reopen. But she’s unlikely to face the consequences of its downtown departure, in contrast to the people in the city.
In his classic essay That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen, the economist Frederic Bastiat observed that every action comes with costs that are both visible and invisible.
“In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects,” Bastiat wrote. “Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause – it is seen. The others unfold in succession – they are not seen.”
We don’t know for sure, but it may be that Target’s departure from the City Center is just one of the untold number of unseen costs of a tragic riot that will have far reaching consequences for people struggling in Minneapolis.
And if you ask Minneapolis residents, Target’s decision may be a harbinger of more to come.
“I think it’s horrible, it’s an ominous sign of things that are going to happen downtown,” Ted Farrell, president of Haskell’s, told a local news outlet. “It’s literally the death of a downtown metro area, it’s actually sad to see.”
Horrible indeed. But also tragically predictable.
Target Egg Heads are a major foundation of Minneapolis, and Minnesota, political group-think that has been so destructive.
The same group-think, that made Minneapolis downtown, a ghost town by 1980. Despite the area having had economic might that provided it some insulation from the Rust Belt off to the east, Chicago, Detroit, and the midwest.
You could still find work, in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but group-think and its violent tendencies, had already created the appearance downtown, of what we see now, elsewhere - the closed and/or boarded-up shops.
I would put 3M, Xcel, and General Mills on the list of Minneapolis business headquarters to probably leave the city or state over the next year.
“…improved remote work opportunities and less need for space as the drivers for the decision.”
LOL. That’s a might big elephant in the room and they just won’t admit that it is crapping up the room.
Super-woke All Access Bathroom Target Can’t Take The Heat, Will Get Out Of The Kitchen.
They gonna fill it with 70” flat screens free for the taking?
When I worked for a Fortune 100 there was a period where remote work was tried and encouraged, but was felt to not be as productive as having people under the same roof. But the technology of that time was (endless) conference calls and email. Now with video conferencing in your pocket, things are different.
Plus there was a sizable contingent (me included) who really didn’t want it to work. Covid forced the issue and required companies to find ways to make it work, despite objections. Given the continual quest for cost savings, especially in public companies, I’m certain that remote work will be part of the “new normal” as much as I despise that phrase.
Considering the cost of child care and commuting, those who work from home can also expect to see a reduction in their salary over what it would have been otherwise, just as would be the case if they’d accepted a job in a part of the country or world with a lower cost of living.
In 1980, life was still pleasant around Lake Hennipen, Edina, and other places beyond the downtown.
St. Paul, was hit or miss. U. of Minn. was still somewhat safe. MMM and Cargill were still moving along.
But downtown, was no longer the center of the actual town. In 1980, it had moved west and south (beyond some trouble that existed immediately to the south of the old downtown).
Far removed from the days of Mary's hat toss, eh?
Not just the city - you can bet the employees themselves, who can (and are majority white) will abandon the city suburbs altogether if not move several counties away or even the state.
Again - for us whites who watched Target pander and spew their “We Wuv the BLM” propaganda and told them to put their money where their mouth was and INCREASE EMPLOYMENT in majority black areas as well as establish corporate offices and HQ - this is the very OPPOSITE of what they proclaimed all summer and will only serve to further damage black and impoverished areas.
The liberals have made both Minneapolis and St. Paul unsafe. Another case of once-great cities crushed by liberalism.
It would appear that Minnesota is about to experience some of the same turmoil that the Detroit-area suffered when the Democrats destroyed the auto industry.
Mary ain’t there no more to turn the world on with her smile.
Just when the liberal, progressive, communist Democrats were trying to herd/railroad people into "population centers" and out of the suburbs, the opposite is happening.
The opposite is happening because of the unintended consequences of their own overblown pandemic fear mongering and their fully encouraged, staged riots.
“but was felt to not be as productive as having people under the same roof.”
I know engineers for a defense contractor who tried it many months ago. They were irritated and couldnt stand Zoom, even threatening to quit. Engineers need to touch the project and talk to others in person to solve problems, not thru a stupid video screen. Even now, they will not use Zoom. They really hated it.
I would like to see the wording on the questionnaire that led to the above statistic about Republicans.
The Ministry of Truth media will probably always equate the “riots” in DC on January 6 with the months-long burning and looting of cities costing billions of dollars and many lives.
. This is very similar to Ted Turner’s multipart series on the cold war which equated the Soviet Union Gulag with Kent State. He made this series available for school use. This was during the time when his CNN was made available free to schools to show “news”.
Good. My bud is a store director for Target. They are MORE woke than Twitter.
To understand the true long term impact you have to look at it from the perspective of an insurance agent. Would you insure a property or a business in downtown Portland? If so, would it be the same premium it was two years ago?
Some cities don’t revive after a riot.
My hometown of Detroit and it’s surrounding suburbs was never quite the same after the 1967 riots. I recall those riot weeks quite well. Many auto workers were laid off due to Labor Union strikes and contract negotiations. Some pensions were shockingly reduced, breaking their promise not to do so. Japanese cars were growing in popularity, whether General Motors liked it or not. Mainly due to better quality.
Life went on, but over the next decade or so the big department stores (Hudsons) began to drastically downsize or move out of town. The second level retailers stayed (Sears, Crowleys, Montgomery Wards, Kresgees), but the service and the inventory began to slowly erode in quality.
The crumbling of downtown real estate values will follow accordingly. Eventually, the deterioration of city services gets added to the mix.
A bit off topic, but does anybody here remember when the ballpark (Twins and Vikings) and hockey arena (North Stars) were that good bit out in the country? I was told this on a vintage sports discussion page on Facebook. And nowadays it is in the middle of suburban sprawl with the shopping mall there now.
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