Mayor Of New York ERUPTS After Target SHUTS DOWN All Locations In New York

Target announced today that it's closing

nine stores in major cities next month

because of theft and organized retail

crime. Right now, at this very moment,

Target closed a store in East Harlem and

told New York why. What happened next

says something about where things stand

between the city and the businesses

still deciding whether to stay. The

announcement came in September 2025.

Target confirmed it was shuttering nine

locations across four states effective

October 21st. One of those stores was in

Harlem. The others were in Seattle, the

San Francisco Bay area, and Portland.

The company didn't bury the reason or

soften it in corporate language. The

statement was direct. Theft and

organized retail crime were threatening

the safety of workers and customers

[music] and contributing to what Target

called unsustainable business

performance. Those weren't talking

points assembled after the fact. They

were the conclusions of a company that

had been tracking a specific problem for

more than a year and had run out of

patience with waiting for it to improve.

CEO Brian Cornell had been raising

alarms publicly well before the

closures. On an earnings call in May of

that year, he told analysts that

organized retail crime, had escalated at

Target stores to a level the company had

never seen. The financial impact was

specific and staggering. shrinkage, the

industry term for inventory loss to

theft, was expected to reduce Target's

fullear profitability by more than $500

million compared to the prior year. On

top of 700 to $800 million in theft

related losses the year before, the math

was pointing somewhere that no retailer

wants to go. By August, Cornell had

added another number to the case.

Violent incidents at Target stores had

increased 120% in the first 5 months of

the year compared to the same period 12

months earlier. not 5%, not 20, 120.

Cornell told investors directly that

safety incidents associated with theft

were moving in the wrong direction. He

also said in May, something that

deserves to be quoted accurately because

it frames everything that came after.

When asked whether Target planned to

close stores due to rising theft,

Cornell pushed back. His words were, "We

do not want to close stores. We know how

important our stores are. They create

local jobs. They generate taxes. They're

very important for those local shoppers

and they play a critical role in

communities across the country. He said

Target would continue to do everything

in its power to keep its doors open.

4 months later, it closed nine of them

anyway. The East Harlem closure hit a

neighborhood that understood exactly

what it meant. The store had served a

community where affordable retail

options were not abundant, where

residents depended on accessible prices

for groceries and everyday essentials,

and where losing a major anchor tenant

doesn't get replaced quickly or easily.

For the workers who found out their

store was closing, the corporate

explanation about theft metrics and

safety incidents didn't make the news

any easier to absorb. Whatever the

reasons, the result was the same. Jobs

were gone. A neighborhood resource was

gone. and the people who depended on

both were left to figure out what came

next. New York officials responded with

the kind of institutional frustration

that tends to follow announcements like

this one. The framing from city and

state leaders leaned toward corporate

abandonment rather than business

necessity. Questions were raised about a

company that reports tens of billions in

annual revenue choosing to close stores

in neighborhoods that needed them. Some

officials pointed to the history of

retailers entering New York markets with

tax incentives and regulatory

accommodations, arguing that benefits

extracted from the public created

obligations that couldn't simply be

walked away from when conditions got

difficult. The push back was

understandable in human terms, but the

response largely avoided engaging with

the specific facts Target had laid out.

The company hadn't cited abstract

business [music] strategy. It had cited

a 120% increase in violent incidents. It

had cited $500 million in projected

losses from theft. It had cited a

documented safety crisis that had been

building long enough that the company

had already exhausted alternatives

before reaching the decision to close.

That case doesn't get weaker because a

retailer is profitable nationally. It

gets made store by store, block by

block, based on conditions that vary

dramatically across a portfolio of

nearly 2,000 locations. Target was also

not alone in making this argument.

Walgreens and CVS had been shuttering

urban locations for similar reasons for

years, citing the same convergence of

cost pressure and theft. Walmart's CEO

had gone on record warning that theft

trends could force store closures and

push prices higher. Home Depot described

organized retail crime as a consistent

pressure it was fighting daily. The

retail industry's public conversation

about shrink and safety had reached a

level of cander unusual for a sector

that typically prefers to keep its

operational headaches private. The fact

that so many companies were saying the

same things independently about the same

problems in the same kinds of markets

suggested the problem wasn't corporate

narrative management. It was an actual

condition on the ground. There's a

counterargument that deserves to be

taken seriously because the full picture

is more complicated than any single data

point. An investigation by CNBC in late

2023 found something that complicated

targets specific framing. Crime rates at

nearby Target locations that remained

open were in several cases higher than

at the stores that were closed. That

finding raised questions about whether

theft was the complete explanation for

closure decisions or whether

underperforming stores were being

shuttered for business reasons that

theft provided useful cover for. Cornell

and Target pushed back, maintaining that

each closure reflected specific safety

and operational conditions at each

location. But the scrutiny was

legitimate and the honest version of

this story has to include it. What isn't

disputed is what happened to Target as a

company in the years that followed the

closures. The problems that preceded the

Harlem decision didn't resolve after

October 2023. They deepened. In January

2025, Target announced it was

eliminating its diversity, equity, and

inclusion programs, aligning with the

political direction of the new federal

administration. The backlash was

immediate and sustained. Customers who

had viewed Target as a values aligned

retailer felt blindsided. A boycott took

hold across social media and critically

it showed up in the numbers. Comparable

store sales fell 3.8% in the first

quarter of 2025. Overall revenue dropped

from $ 24.5 billion to $23.8 billion.

Foot traffic declined for eight

consecutive weeks. The stock lost more

than a third of its value and wiped out

over $20 billion in shareholder worth.

Tariffs compounded the damage. President

Trump's import duties pushed up

merchandise costs across Target's

product mix, squeezing the margins on

everything from electronics to household

basics at precisely the moment consumer

confidence was falling and customers

were already reconsidering where to

spend. Cornell acknowledged the

compounding pressure publicly. His words

on an earnings call were unambiguous.

The company was not satisfied with its

results and was moving with urgency to

navigate through a period of volatility.

In August 2025, Brian Cornell announced