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Hundreds of people are out of a job Tuesday after Minneapolis-based Target Corporation announced layoffs.
According to WARN notices provided to the state of Minnesota, the layoffs include at least 500 employees at its downtown headquarters and 287 employees at its Brooklyn Park offices.
The layoffs span across the company, including buyers, communications, finance, design and cybersecurity.
For more context on the economic conditions around these layoffs, MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with Tyler Schipper, an associate professor of Data Analytics and Economics at the University of St. Thomas.
A transcript of their conversation is below, edited for clarity.
Target is one of the biggest employers in downtown Minneapolis, and it’s not the first big company to announce layoffs. Amazon is letting go of 14,000 workers. Do these reorganizations make sense given the current economy?
When you look at the wording from both of these corporations, it’s being put in terms of trying to be more nimble, but we’re still talking about big layoffs at corporations that are consumer-facing. I think a lot of this is a reflection of how consumers feel about the economy right now, and there’s probably differences in why each of these corporations is doing this. But Target’s probably much more likely to have a bigger local feel, given how important they are downtown.
Can you characterize the market that retail businesses are operating in right now?
We’re in an interesting place right now, where there’s kind of two different types of consumers. High-income consumers still feel pretty good about the world and they keep spending money, but middle-income and lower-income consumers feel not so great about the world.
We’ve seen, for instance, even people making six figures much more likely to shop at places like Walmart and Dollar Tree than in the past. Those are some of the headwinds that a corporation like Target is feeling, where if people perceive you to be more about discretionary spending rather than necessities, that means that you might be losing out on some sales right now, and hence you might be having to lay some people off now.
Do you expect other businesses to follow these reorganizations?
In the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, a lot of these jobs are what we consider to be professional and business service jobs; and that’s actually been one of the segments of jobs that we’ve seen lots of losses lately. It’s been typically health care and government where we’ve seen lots of job gains, while professional business services have seen lots of months with decreases. That's been more so even true in Minnesota.
I would expect to continue to see this to happen, but even as these are big headlines, remembering that right now the job market is kind of treading water — that we aren’t seeing wide-scale layoffs right now, but we’re also not seeing bunches of companies hiring, which means that when these workers go out to try and find a job, it’s probably going to be a pretty tough job market.
I think of this time of year as being when retail businesses are hiring temporary workers. Does that run counter to the reports we’re seeing today?
These are mostly corporate jobs, so 500 out of the downtown office — people who are ordering products for the retail stores, for instance, or forecasting what sales might be. Both Target and Amazon have portrayed this as a de-layering. These are not those frontline retail workers doing the actual sales on the ground. We very well might see increases in retail workers while still seeing layoffs at corporate headquarters.
My colleague Chris Farrell reported that the labor market is “frozen” right now, meaning people are not leaving their jobs because they're worried about finding another one. Will layoffs further tighten the labor market?
Yeah. One of the best indications of this is that it is taking longer for people to find a job. I mean, this data is a little bit out of date because we haven't gotten our September unemployment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but we were already seeing the average time to find a job ticking up, and the number of people that were long-term unemployed was also growing. Those are both indications that it's just harder to slot into that new job.
And as you have more layoffs, whether they’re from the federal government or from Target or Amazon, you just have more people that are out of work looking for those slots where people aren’t moving out of jobs at a corporation to go find somewhere else.
“Frozen” is a great description. We’ve also used the word “static.” Even with a low unemployment rate, a frozen labor market means that it’s very hard if you find yourself out of work, to find that next job. That’s really important, because it’s not about the individual. It’s not that the individual is doing something wrong or not good at looking for jobs. It’s about the context — there aren’t a lot of jobs to be found, or a lot of job openings right now,
Is it too early determine that a recession might be coming?
Yes, it's still too early, particularly because a lot of the GDP growth numbers still look pretty strong, and consumption spending still looks OK right now. We'll need more data to tell.
Correction (Oct. 29, 2025): An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Target employees being laid off. This story has been corrected.
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