If the holiday shopping season is a retailer’s final exam each year, back-to-school is the midterms. For Target, this year’s test is a big one.
Success depends on getting the basics right: exciting merchandise, fully stocked stores, and competitive pricing. Those are all areas where Target has stumbled in recent years.
This year’s season is also an early read on CEO Michael Fiddelke’s turnaround plan. He took the reins earlier this year after a rough patch for Target, which faced boycotts in 2025 after winding down several diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Last week, it faced fresh criticism over a children’s Halloween costume resembling racist minstrel imagery; Target pulled it and apologized.
To see how Target is trying to pull it off, Business Insider visited a pair of stores in Madison, Wisconsin, with chief stores officer Adrienne Costanzo.
Costanzo is a 22-year veteran of Target and has held numerous roles in HR and store operations. Her appointment to her current position came in February 2025, roughly six months before Fiddelke was announced as CEO. She’s now responsible for more than 350,000 workers across 2,000 stores in all 50 US states.
This month, Costanzo has logged serious miles to check in with shoppers, employees, and store managers about what’s working and what isn’t in their stores as they head back to school.
“This is the 16th state in three weeks of visits,” she said while in Madison. “I’ve been to Michigan, I’ve been to Nebraska, I mean, I’ve been like everywhere.”
On the Saturday of this visit, grade-school parents were gearing up for the first day of class, and college students at the University of Wisconsin were kitting out their apartments. Dorm move-ins were still a week away, and both locations were doing brisk business.
Unlike the holidays, different school seasons peak at different times, creating all manner of complexity for inventory planning and staffing, Fiddelke told investors on a second-quarter earnings call.
“The foot traffic is incredible — the parents and students,” Costanzo said of her multi-state tour.
Her visits include conversations with shoppers who express relief at Target’s improved in-stock rates and positive impressions of collaborations with brands like LoveShackFancy and Hollister, she said. It’s a return to the sort of merchandising that helps draw customers into stores and tempts them to add unexpected finds to an already full shopping cart.
During the tours, Costanzo talked with store managers about everything from their hiring and training efforts in the prior months to a new trailer loading strategy that helps store workers get merchandise onto shelves more quickly.
Even with higher traffic, both locations were more tightly stocked than on previous Business Insider visits, with no inventory carts lingering in the aisles. (Costanzo’s visit was announced ahead of time.)
A notable exception to the fully stocked shelves was a section reserved for Pokémon, which the store director said sold out after more than 50 customers had been waiting in line for the merchandise to drop.
“You can’t sell air,” Costanzo said, explaining to the store leaders that her team is working on a solution to ensure important shelf space doesn’t sit idle while suppliers work to catch up with high demand.
While this visit involved a bit of an entourage, Costanzo said she also drops in on stores incognito, which allows her to get more of a guest-eye view of how Target’s teams are performing.
One such visit, she said, showed her Target still has work to do in training and balancing the responsibilities of store teams during busy moments like this.
“Our team puts their head down and is doing the work,” she said. “I did not experience a lot of the eye contact and smiles. I didn’t experience as much as I would have wanted around attention on the check lanes.”
“I want us to stand at our best when we’re busy with the total experience,” she added.
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