America spotted at Target
Dear Target:
I must admit I was pleasantly surprised when, a few weeks back, I received an invitation in the mail to the March 7 grand opening of your new Target in West Hollywood. I took it to mean you were concerned about me; after all, your new Target is in my neighborhood, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea, where traffic is already choked enough, which makes me angry, which makes me afraid to leave my house because then I will get angry.
Still, when I received your invitation I began to consider what to wear and whom to bring as a date (other than my wallet, that is!). Now, ordinarily, I would not consider another major-store franchise arriving in my immediate vicinity positive news. I mean, not to bore you, Target, but I’ve had it just about up to here with Whole Foods, which has me hooked (orzo salad, orzo salad) and, it seems to me, is using its mind-appetite control tactics to slowly drive me crazy. I mean, the other night at the Santa Monica and Fairfax location it was chaos in there -- so bad that I had to bag my own groceries.
I am not good at bagging and there was nobody around to teach me, and meanwhile I saw posters about yoga. How was that supposed to help?
You, by comparison, are OK by me. In fact, you are more than OK, because you are from Minnesota. Roseville, to be exact, where the very first Target opened in 1962. People from Minnesota, I have found, are good and upstanding, and not looking to pull a fast one on me or make me bag my own groceries, metaphorically speaking.
All of which leads me to say that I attended your opening last Sunday with the same giddy anticipation some of our brethren here in Hollywood had attending the Academy Awards. As I said, I wasn’t sure whom to bring, but I did know this: Unlike those celebrities, at the award shows, I wasn’t about to hide behind my children or pose as a family man or any of that hooey. In the end, I went alone, without a publicist or a beard, just to keep people guessing.
Target, let me say that your new store is a marvel! In fact, never have I seen a better example of the burbs coming to the urbs, and the people of the urbs greeting the burbs with open arms. Open arms filled with desk lamps, I should say!
Target, you may hail from the white-bread Midwest, but walking the floors of your new West Hollywood store last Sunday afternoon, I saw America. I saw an extended family conversing in Russian; I saw three gay men debating the shoe size of an 11-year-old girl, the sister of one of the gay men; I saw a Latino boy hold up a Power Rangers Action Racers and say to his mother: “This es malo”; I’m pretty sure I saw actress Fairuza Balk; I swear I heard a Target Team member say into her walkie-talkie: “Go ahead, Breakfast Tuna.”
I witnessed a serious discussion of bedding among four twentysomethings. I saw meditation CDs, plasma-screen TVs, Pilates balls and, my favorite, an aisle marked “beveragewear.” I saw food. I also saw a Michael Graves wall clock. I do not need a Michael Graves wall clock. And yet there was my hand, moving as if no longer part of my body. Come to the clock.
Outside the store, I spoke to a Target Team member who told me the West Hollywood store is a “prototype for the new stores,” which is to say higher-end merchandise and a kind of piazza feel outside: A courtyard with a Ben & Jerry’s and a Starbucks and, coming soon, a Baja Fresh and a Jamba Juice.
Why not live jazz? I would also like to compliment whoever came up with the naming scheme of your expansion -- i.e. from Target (130,000 square feet) to Target Greatland (142,000 square feet), to Super Target (174,000 square feet). Target West Hollywood is a 130,000-square-footer, and while the structure lacks the impetuosity of Gehry’s Disney Hall, there is a modernist bent to it, I would argue.
“We’ve been able to, how should I put this, adapt our stores to the communities in which they’re built,” said Lena Klofstad, spokeswoman for Target Corp.
It’s kind of a “Babe: Pig in the City” situation. For just east of the development, on Santa Monica and Formosa, Eddie Murphy was stopped by police back in 1997 after allegedly picking up a transsexual prostitute. As his publicist said at the time, Murphy was “simply trying to be a good Samaritan.”
It’s that Midwest spirit, you might say.
Paul Brownfield can be reached at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.
