Business Week attacks Target... again

Business Week attacks Target... again

Dated July 17th, Business Week has an artcle, Where Target May Miss The Mark, that attacks Target's credit card business.

That "Biz Weak" is attacking Target is no surprise, especially when the article is written by Robert Berner. A very quick search turns up a slew of anti-Target articles by Berner:
Target: The Cool Factor Fizzles
Target Takes a Gamble the Markets Don't Like
Has Target's Food Foray Missed the Mark?
Too Many Retailers, Not Enough Shoppers

I started to think Berner was anti-retail in general, but here he is cheerleading for the KMart-Sears merger: Kmart and Sears: An 11 Billion Dollar Goliath

The attacks on Target go back years, and he's been pretty consistently wrong. He predicted years ago that their grocery business would flop (it didn't) and was against their credit card operation from the beginning. That's just plain silly; if Target having its own VISA was such a bad idea, Wal-Mart and Home Depot wouldn't be desperately scrambling to get into the banking business.

Why do I even care? Like Berner, I'm not qualified to evaluate businesses in terms of stock performance or project future success or failure.

My concern is credit. Here are two top 10 lists that are unfortunately registration only: Consumer Reports' Top 10 Consumer-Friendly Credit Cards and Advertising Age's article on the Top 10 Credit Card Issuers. For the sake of this post, the important thing about these lists is that Target is the only credit card issuer on both lists. They're one of the top 10 in the country, and they're rated one of the top 10 consumer-friendliest. No one else can say that.

Incidentally, reasonable interest rates was a criteria in the "consumer-friendly" survey, yet Berner in Business Week consistently refers to Target's Visa card as "high-interest".

What's my point with all of this? Ignore Business Week when it comes to Target: as consumer credit card issuers go, you can do a lot worse. Not only does their Visa have good terms (low rates, fees, reasonable grace period, no two-cycle billing, no universal default), you're never more than 40 miles from a Target store (on average), where you can pay your credit card bill, have the funds posted to your account immediately, and get a reciept. What other credit card issuers can offer all of that?