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TORONTO • In January 2011, Target Corp. set the stage for its pending Canadian debut by announcing it had acquired up to 220 Zellers leases.

Just four months later, executives unveiled a list of the first 105 selected sites, believing an address-by-address breakdown would whet Canadian consumers’ appetites for the Bullseye-logoed chain well in advance of its arrival, even though a grand opening for its initial handful of stores would not happen until the spring of 2013.

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With Target, it was telegraphed to them

The incumbent retailers in Canada rolled up their sleeves: they had just been handed a site-by-site roadmap to use for plotting a strategic counterassault. It would be a battle plan for a war on Target, setting the stage for much tougher competition once the U.S. giant finally arrived.

A series of further problems — from supply-chain issues to customers’ perceptions of higher prices — would come to compound the problems for Target, culminating in the company’s Canadian arm filing for creditor protection Thursday, and announcing it would shut all its stores here, after amassing more than $2 billion in operating losses.