In 1962, the world’s first Target store opened in the St. Paul suburb of Roseville, an experiment to see if the drab postwar discount store could be remade into something nicer.
And the first Walmart store opened the same year. Over the next half-century, Walmart built discount stores around the globe — but never in Roseville. Until now.
At 8 a.m. Wednesday, Walmart will open the doors of its sprawling Roseville SuperCenter at Cleveland Avenue and County Road C. That’s about 1 1/2 miles, and 52 years, from the site of the first Target.
For retail watchers who monitor the move-and-countermove between retail giants Walmart and Target, the new Roseville store — part of Walmart’s broader expansion into the Twin Cities — marks a bit of a milestone.
“If you’re going to come into a market like this, where Target owns the market, you come in with a serious number of stores,” said retail consultant Stan Pohmer. “You come in where you can leverage your advertising, and where you can make a statement.”
Walmart’s statement in Roseville comes in the form of a 150,000-square-foot SuperCenter that will be open everyday from 6 a.m. until midnight.
Patrick Trudgeon, Roseville’s city manager, said the arrival of Walmart “brings more shopping options for our residents.”
But Roseville is loaded with retail already; what most excites city officials is that it “kicks off the redevelopment of the Twin Lakes area, an area of old trucking terminals that we’ve been working on for more than two decades.”
As for the shared past of Roseville and Target, Trudgeon said, “I think people are aware that Target started here, it’s a nice piece of local history. But I’m not sure it plays a significant role in where they shop.”
Walmart has announced that after the Roseville SuperCenter opens, it intends to close a smaller Walmart in nearby St. Anthony Village. Many of those employees will transfer over.
“We were initially told that there were no plans to close it,” Trudgeon said of the St. Anthony store. “But I guess plans changed.”
Walmart is in the midst of an aggressive expansion into the Twin Cities metro, a market still dominated by Minneapolis-based Target and supermarket leader Cub Foods. The fact that both Target and Cub’s parent Supervalu have headquarters here is widely seen as one reason Walmart shied away from this area for so long.
Both Target and Walmart were created in 1962, and their first stores are significant partly because they still powerfully shape their companies.
Target was the creation of the Dayton department store family, who saw the frowsy discount stores of that era and strived to create a better breed of discounter that would win over shoppers in the fast-growing postwar suburbs.
Meanwhile, Walmart founder Sam Walton found success stressing the lowest prices to his rural customers in small-town Arkansas.
“The core of who they are as retailers was really established back in the ’60s,” Pohmer said. “One was grassroots, in rural areas. One was more trendy, affluent, reaching a different demographic in suburbia. And to a degree, that philosophy, the old principles, still hold true.”
Today both Target and Walmart have expanded nationwide, and both have planted stores in the suburbs. And starting Wednesday, they’ll both be in Roseville.
“I think the location of Walmart here in Roseville had a lot to do with demographics and income in Roseville,” Trudgeon said. “I know that Walmart is expanding pretty large here in the Twin Cities, to create a greater presence, so this is just part of that strategy.”
Tom Webb can be reached at 651-228-5428. Follow him at twitter.com/TomWebbMN.
