An Open Letter to Target
A plea for America's fourth largest supermarket chain to remember their roots
Target is a—perhaps the—Minnesota institution. In addition to being the second most profitable company in Minnesota and the state’s fourth largest employer, its name adorns both our MLB stadium and our NBA arena—its mascot, Bullseye, wagging his tail at you from the Target Center façade as you take in a ballgame at Target Field.
Target is also, for better or worse, my grocer of choice. About once a week, I find myself at one of several Twin Cities stores (sometimes including the very first Target, still in the same Roseville location it originally debuted in 1962).
And, in between hearing the same Carly Rae Jepsen song I just finished listening to in the car and being bombarded with seasonally appropriate knick-knacks I don’t need but will buy anyway, I’ll naturally walk by some employees going about their business. If you’re familiar with Target, you can probably picture them: almost all of them wear red shirts, but no two shirts are the same. Target doesn’t have a set employee uniform, instead allowing its floor workers to wear just about any red top they want, even those that include non-Target graphics.
I’ve never worked at Target, so I’m not that familiar with the specifics. Luckily, Reddit exists.
According to this graphic, employees must wear a red top, and “any shade of red is fine, but not orange, pink, or purple”. Yet nearly every time I hit up a Twin Cities Target, I’ll see an employee wearing a maroon University of Minnesota top. Maroon is definitely not red, so this is—and I’ll pull some punches and put it mildly because I like Target—a complete and utter disgrace to the entire state of Minnesota. It’s downright offensive to the state’s largest university, its 50,000 students, its 500,000 alumni, and its millions of fans.
They might not know it, but by tacitly suggesting that maroon is a shade of red and allowing Golden Gophers merch to be worn by their employees on the clock, Target is doing a tremendous disservice to their homeland. Thankfully for everyone involved, there’s an easy fix: just revise the dress code to disallow it and we’re all good.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m extremely pro-labor. I wouldn’t be suggesting a measure that inherently reduces the Target employee quality of life unless it was really, really necessary. But this is imperative. Maroon is not red.
“But, Eli”, I hear you saying, “maroon is red. Merriam-Webster defines it as ‘a dark red’. The official ‘UMN Maroon’ color has an RGB value of 122 0 25, which indicates that the color is obviously red.”
And to that I say: no. You are wrong. It is not red. Maroon is maroon—it’s Minnesota’s color.
Red belongs to that school in Madison. And never the twain shall meet.
I beg of you, Target. Please fix this. Recognize that “Better Dead than Red” means something different up here and stop letting your employees represent the University of Minnesota on the clock.
For the love of your home state.