Minneapolis Target Reopens Store Looted in 2020 George Floyd Protests

Nearly six months after it was ransacked in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, the Target Corp. store in South Minneapolis is re-opening.

Many parts of it will look just as they had before — the bright red and white exterior; the aisles filled with private-label Target brands; the bins of low-cost items in front. But many others will look different. The pharmacy was moved up to the front of the store so elderly customers can easily get their prescriptions; the grocery was stocked with more varieties of spices requested by the local community; the crosswalk from the nearby rail station was made safer and the lighting around it brighter; and the entrance was made more inviting with a new mural and plants.

The overhaul forms part of what executives at Target, a retailer long associated with White suburban shoppers, describe as an effort to improve its image with Black customers.

The store, which sits right between Target’s own headquarters and the spot where Floyd was killed by police, drew a national spotlight when it was looted and burned during demonstrations denouncing police brutality at the neighboring Third Precinct. Drawing shoppers from areas twice as Black as a typical Target, according to cell phone data tracked by SafeGraph, the site’s destruction incited a wider debate on what giant corporations owe their local communities, especially ones that are far more diverse than their internal C-suites. And with Black shoppers holding more than $1 trillion in annual spending power in the U.S., according to Nielsen, Target had an incentive to figure it out.

“By being based in Minneapolis — by being based in the eye of the storm of George Floyd — they had a huge responsibility to produce a pretty elaborate plan,” Anthony Thompson, a professor of clinical law and a founding faculty director of the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law at New York University, said of Target’s decision to raze and reconstruct the store.

It’s not exactly clear why this specific store was targeted; protesters originally headed there for milk to relieve the pain from being tear gassed. But in rebuilding, Target realized the surrounding neighborhood had never been asked point-blank whether the store that's been there since 1976 was serving it well. It wasn’t.

The litany of complaints was long. And even though a remodel in 2018 fixed earlier perceptions the store was dirty, poorly stocked and a bit of an afterthought, some White residents in the Longfellow neighborhood would still drive to a different Target instead, derogatorily referring to the location — and its customers — as “Tar-ghetto.”

So the roughly $80 billion corporation did something it hadn’t before: met with Black residents, employees and community organizers (over Zoom; it’s 2020 after all) to ask what they wanted to see in the reconstructed store.

Target hired a contracting company owned by a Somali-American woman and built some of those neighborhood requests into its blueprints. It also added shutters to the store that can come down in case of future emergencies.

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