Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 8 of 16

Brian Cornell: And Michael, back to lessons learned from last year. We’ve used the term uncertainty quite a bit today. We recognized last year that the consumer trends move very quickly. And one of the things I’m most proud of is the way this leadership team embraced the challenge, took it head on, made the adjustments in our inventory and protected the guest experience. That’s why we continue to see traffic growth and unit share gains across our portfolio and why we’re so well positioned today for 2023 with overall inventory down 3%, but importantly, discretionary inventory down 13%. So lessons learned for us, but I’m incredibly proud of the way this team dealt with that issue upfront, protected our team, protected our guests and position us for the long term.

Paul Lejuez: Paul Lejuez, Citigroup. A couple of questions on Drive-Up returns. Curious what percent of your returns are done at store? Also what is your typical attach rate? When you get somebody in a store that would return an item, do you also convert them to sales? Is there a risk that you might give up that opportunity? And then second, just high level, free cash flow once you get through all the working capital changes in F ’23, what does free cash flow look like in your view for this upcoming year?

Brian Cornell: So several questions to answer there. I might ask you to start and explain why we’re so excited about the changes we’re making with returns through Drive-Up? And then Michael, we can talk about the second part of the question.

Michael Fiddelke: Yes. The majority of returns come back to store, but a meaningful portion are still shipped back to us. So that’s not insignificant. As it relates to your — the second part of your question around attach rate, and this is the question when we started order pickup and when we started Drive-Up. And to us, that’s respectfully not an important consideration. What is important is allow the guests to interact with us how they choose. And at every step when they see us — when we see them jump into Drive-Up, when we see them use shipped. When they — we see them use pickup. Their engagement with target increases, not just digitally, but also in store, and that becomes a better guest for Target. The best guest set for Target are the ones that interact with all of our various ways of interacting with them.

And so this provides them another opportunity to create ease. You’ve got your kid in the back. I need some milk and I got to return this whatever at Target. I put that in my trunk. I show up. They bring the milk, they take that away, and I’m off on my day again. And then on Saturday, we’ll come in and do the stock-up trip, and that will be great. So our approach is just to continue to lean into where they want us to go. Top two feedback things on Drive-Up, why can’t I get my coffee? Why can’t I get a Starbucks? And why can’t I return something? And so we’re still working on the Starbucks, but we’re ready for returns. And again, if we listen to the guests, they’ll engage with us.

Brian Cornell: So I think one of the things we’ve learned over the last 3 years, and we watched it carefully as we expanded Drive-Up and pick up and started delivering right your home with Shipt, we said, all right, is this going to impact the guest engagement in store. It’s quite the opposite. As guests use all of our capabilities, they actually spend more dollars in store and just reward us with more trips. So it’s been an important learning that we’ll build on. And I think we’ll just deepen that engagement as we give them another easy solution for returns.

Page 8 of 16