I'd be a little more impressed with Adams if he could've delivered a Uwajimaya instead...

Jason Wu line came out 2 weeks ago

The differences between Target and Wal-Mart are not as great as many would think. My sense is that if you polled people in Portland, they would respond far more negatively to Wal-Mart than to Target, but if you tried to pin them down on the differences, they wouldn't be able to explain them in any informed way. I've had a couple conversations like this myself. And even if Wal-Mart is a bit worse, that's not really the point here.

@5: Are you some sort of Walgreen's regional manager or something? Just a fan?

Walgreen's in my neck of the woods is the single worst neighbor around. They cut down shade trees without telling neighbors whose fences back right up to them, they park delivery trucks in the middle of a narrow neighborhood street instead of their parking lot and they have consistently refused to provide any sort of documentation of permits or communications with the city.

What I'm getting at here is that most large chains don't have much incentive to give two shits about either employees or the store's surrounding community. A WalMart is a Target is a Lowe's is a WaWa. If you're going to bitch about one of them, just make sure to shop at your co-op/New Seasons/WinCo/local Russian furniture store on SE Foster.

That said, something needed to go into the Galleria space, and there are enough Forest Heightsers, SW retirees and Pearl District out-of-state transplants that I think we can have some confidence that this will have a good ripple effect on local businesses around it. People like to multiply visits to businesses once they're already paying for parking.

How Companies Learn Your Secrets -- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine…

"Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”"

Although it seems trivial, there is no fucking "Pioneer Square Wallgreens" It's a fucking Rite Aid.
If you spent any time downtown with your head not in your ass, you would know about the Rite Aid. The pills, heroin, street kids and dogs etc. The Rite Aid is a perfect example of the real reality of our city and why a city Target with actual standards would be a "clean, safe" place to go.

O Target, we beseech thee to purify our city. All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.

Freddie beat me to it.

Also, if you're a fan of New Seasons putting a store into a vacant lot on Williams, you can't complain about Target going into a near vacant building downtown. You just can't.

New Seasons could be a lot better, but they're hardly comparable to an international retail giant that has driven sprawl around the country, contributes money to all kinds of homophobic groups and Republican politicians, pays wages comparable to those of Wal-Mart, sells all kinds of sweatshop goods, etc.

Don't blame the retailer; blame the market. Stores don't sell products that people don't buy. Take it up with your neighbors.

That only addresses one issue that I mentioned (sweatshop goods) and I don't have the space to counter such a simplistic "free-market" philosophy here. Obviously retailers need to have ethical business practices with what they sell; we can't just shift all the blame to the consumer (or "the market" whatever that means specifically in this discussion). When stores like Target and Wal-Mart have made it next-to-impossible for different types of businesses to exist (Portland being a notable exception) and driven down the prices of goods so that it's impossible for anyone to make a living wage and be competitive, it doesn't make sense to blame people for not buying other types of goods. The largest retailers have actually set the terms of the entire market in which retails goods are produced and sold.

"Obviously retailers need to have ethical business practices with what they sell"

No, they don't. They need to comply with the law of whatever land they're opperating in. Consumers need to have ethical practices in what they buy, at least if that's an issue which is important to them. It's simple becaues it's true. To pawn that responsibility off on the retailer is nothing more than a way to shift blame from one's self to a faceless entity. it's as cheap as Target's products.

I'm not pawning anything off. Consumers and retailers BOTH need to have ethical standards, and if laws need changing, so be it. What you seem to be arguing is things like DDT should be legal, and if I don't like consumers buying it, I should take it up with the consumer.
Until laws change, boycotts and fighting the opening of big box stores are another workable tactic.
The answer to the slave trade was abolition, not individuals finding alternatives to slave labor. It was so woven into the entire economy that convincing individual to take a principled stand would never have ended the slave trade. Fucked-up labor issues are so woven into industries such as chocolate, sugar, clothing, etc. etc. that there's no viable alternative, and this is thanks to companies like Target and Wal-Mart. There's no real way for people who shop at these stores to research all the horrible ethics of every product they buy and try to buck the system by voting with their money.
And again, because you've not addressed all the other things I noted about Target that make them vastly different from New Seasons, I'll assume we're in agreement on those. If so, good. There's no reason Galleria had to become a Target. Some locally-owned store(s) could have gone in there instead.