So, it’s not surprising that during perhaps the most collectively stressful slice of modern American history - Google searches for “self-care” spiked drastically during the first pandemic lockdown and are even more frequent now - retailers have tapped in to that anxiety. 11 terrorist attacks, companies of all sizes pumped out patriotic ads, including a General Motors commercial urging people to “keep America rolling” by purchasing a new truck. Retailers have long searched for ways to capitalize on the national mood: In the 1960s and ’70s, Madison Avenue cashed in on the counterculture to sell everything from cereal to cigarettes after the Sept. “It becomes more of an experience, versus, ‘Here is my list, let me get in and get out.’” “You have your coffee as you meander,” Farrell said. The brand’s marketing has long portrayed the retailer as a place to get stylish stuff without breaking the bank, Farrell said, noting that while some competitors prioritize cheapest-prices-here advertisements, Target focuses on a shop-here-be-chic message buoyed by years of collaborations with high-end fashion designers and brands such as Isaac Mizrahi, Anna Sui and Missoni.Īnd the stores themselves are designed to alleviate stressors, Farrell said, noting wide aisles to prevent cart jams, departments that flow into one another to subconsciously guide your wandering and the addition in recent years of in-store Starbucks locations.
“They understand how the consumers are using their store - using it as this slight escape,” Justine Farrell, associate professor and chair of the marketing department at the University of San Diego’s Knauss School of Business, said of Target. She’s among a cohort of Gen Z, millennial and Gen X women who view frequent trips to the cheap-chic retailer less as a weekly chore than as a therapeutic experience of sorts - alone time like you might get while going on a solo hike or getting a massage, but under the guise of errands so they’re easier to carve out with some frequency. It’s that the layout here in Culver City looks enough like the one back home in Silicon Valley that she flashes back to Target runs with her mom in the ‘90s, and that there are people around you but no pressure to talk to them.
It clearly says something about the commodification of self-care, she acknowledges, but it’s about more than that too - it’s that the store is big and bright and air-conditioned and she can zone out and wander in a way she wouldn’t feel safe doing at a park.
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