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In future years, Target Canada will serve as a gold standard case study in what retailers should not do when they enter a new market.

From opening too many stores at once to a lack of a sales website, Target took multiple missteps — some of them operational, some strategic — in order to flop as spectacularly as it did in Canada, the sum total of which resulted in a group of highly disenchanted consumers.

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“We missed the mark from the beginning by taking on too much too fast,” chief executive Brian Cornell conceded in a company blog post on Thursday as the company announced it is shutting down its 133 Canadian stores just two years after its much-anticipated launch.

We missed the mark from the beginning by taking on too much too fast

As the retailer heralded its fastest-ever retail rollout — 124 stores in the first year alone — the pace was meant to vault the company to the scale of an industry leader capable of competing with Walmart as it had done in the United States.

That strategy skirted the path most retailers take in making their first international forays: opening a few test stores and tweaking them in response to consumer demand. If there is evidence of a good appetite, the company can open more.