Target’s renowned bull’s-eye is so cosmically connected with the brand which it is hard to envision that the retail behemoth ever messing with the emblem red color. But within the last decade — under pressure from customers, shareholders and employees — Target retail future has been morphing into a very different hue: eco-green.
The Minneapolis retailer best-known for its cool, private-label brands and its millennial-friendly prices, has very publicly embraced the renewable energy passions of its own millennial-heavy consumer foundation and is adding rooftop solar panels into its own shops to generate renewable electricity at a breathtaking pace.
Goal is indeed serious about being viewed as a friend of the world that by November, the company said, it will have erected rooftop solar panels on 500 of its stores from america. That is more than one-quarter of its total 1,855 shops, and Target hopes to reach that goal one year sooner than estimated.
By the end of 2019, Target will have achieved 25 percent of its own assignment to attain 100 percent renewable electricity in its shops — and this only months after declaring the pledge. In its constant bid to out-green archrival Walmart, Target also has ranked No. 1 in on-site solar capacity for three years in a row at the Solar Energy Industries Association’s Solar Means Business report, a survey of corporate solar users.
“We see this as among the most important things we can do,” said Mark Schindele, senior vice president of possessions at Target. “The headline we are focused on is this: What’s most important to Target’s guests?”
A recurring answer: sustainability. Almost three in four Objective customers say that sustainability is”extremely” or”quite” important to them, according to a customer analysis completed last fall.
At a time once the federal government is stepping away from addressing issues like sustainability and climate change, corporate America is stepping up. Retail giants from Objective to Walmart to Amazon; and technology titans from Apple to Google into Facebook, are taking action to respond because it’s good for business and good for corporate image. For most customers, addressing core issues like climate change and sustainability go hand-in-hand with bringing their business.
Going green has never seemed so good — or cost so small. That explains why businesses in the United States bought three times as much power generated from solar and wind energy in 2018 than they did the year before.
“Every component of retailing’s machine is going to be modernized and finally energized green,” said Marshal Cohen, chief retail business analyst at The NPD Group, a research and consulting specialist. This green evolution not only applies to energy use, but everything from packaging to fuel consumption during delivery,” he said. “Retailers will pursue greenness to be viewed as part of the DNA.”
This has left many of the world’s biggest companies falling all over themselves to embrace solar energy, wind power and other renewables. But within the past decade, major retailers such as Target and Walmart, who utilize vast amounts of energy in their stores, have gone from sticking a toe in the water to diving in headfirst.
“Target and Walmart are competing over who can be greener,” explained Mr. Wetstone. Apart from saving serious money on energy costs, he said,”There are enormous business benefits from having customers understand that you simply walk the walk.”
The solar panels on the roof of Target’s distribution center in Phoenix could be seen by passengers arriving and departing on flights in nearby Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
The solar panels on the roof of Target’s distribution centre in Phoenix can be observed by passengers arriving and leaving on flights at neighboring Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.Credit
Which could explain why because mid-2017, Target’s distribution centre in Phoenix has been outfitted with a huge solar panel display made in the shape of Goal’s bull’s-eye emblem. The solar panel display — which stretches the space of seven football fields — could be observed by passengers arriving and leaving on flights at nearby Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Because Target is indeed widely recognized for its layout capacities, designing the solar panels in the form of Target’s emblem was a no-brainer, said Mr. Schindele.
But Walmart is right on Target’s tail. Additionally, it has established a long-term goal of using 100 percent renewable energy. “We know this is about the heads of our clients,” explained Laura Phillips, senior vice president of sustainability in Walmart. By 2025, Walmart intends to power 50 percent of its own operations using renewable energy via on-site installations and buys from outside electricity suppliers.
This helps to explain why firms purchased twice as much renewable power a year than they did the year before, said Mr. Wetstone. They purchased 8.6. Gigawatts of solar energy and wind power in 2018, that is sufficient to power 2.2 million American homes annually, according to the American Council on Renewable Energy.
In India, rooftop solar energy is in 90 percent of its own buildings. And in China, Walmart recently put a rooftop solar job in a Sam’s Club store in Jiangxi Province.
Worldwide, Walmart has 136 projects under development which will generate the next two billion kilowatts of renewable energy,” Ms. Phillips stated. And through a supplier-focused initiative that Walmart calls Job Gigaton, the merchant is working to avoid one billion metric tons (a gigaton) of greenhouse gases in the global value chain by 2030.
Back in Goal, the company’s rooftop solar program began with a trickle round 2011, soon after John Leisen, Target’s vice president of land management, joined the company. The program took off in 2015 when 150 stores added solar roofs — and only four decades later, that figure has more than tripled.
Not many Target stores are solar roof candidates, however, because most of its smaller shops are leased spaces and some are in areas of the country in which the economics of going solar do not work out. Target will not say what it is investing in solar, but Mr. Leisen affirmed it’s”tens of thousands” of dollars.
A solar panel rooftop system for a mass merchandiser like Target or Walmart can cost $150,000 to install, according to estimates from the Solar Energy Industries Association, a nonprofit trade association of this solar-energy industry.
