SANTA ROSA -- Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) on Friday said it plans to open its second Santa Rosa department store, currently under construction at Coddingtown Mall, in July.
It's one of three Bay Area store openings for the Minneapolis-based chain set for this year. The 144,000-square-foot Santa Rosa store would employ about 200, and planned stores in south San Jose and Santa Clara would hire 300 and 200, respectively.
"The San Francisco Bay Area is an exciting region," said Cary Strouse, senior vice president of Western region stores.
In recent months, Target opened a store in San Rafael and one in East Washington Place regional mall in Petaluma, the newest of 10 North Bay stores. The company operates 1,921 stores -- 1,797 in the United States and 124 in Canada.
The new Santa Rosa store is set to offer fresh produce, fresh packaged meat and prepackaged baked goods, pharmacy and vision clinic as well as a Starbucks coffee shop.
Job fairs typically are held about two months before an opening for the roughly 200 employees to be hired for the store. Applicants can start applying at target.com/careers and in existing stores three months before the opening.
The new Santa Rosa store is slated to start a local grant program, contribute to the United Way and donate food to a member agency of Feeding America.
Target on Jan. 10 said its fourth-quarter sales in comparable stores appear to have dropped 2.5 percent from a year, attributed to news of a past data breach of details about 70 million customers, first reported by the company on Dec. 17. Quarterly sales were "strong" before the announcement and set to put comparable sales on par with those of a year before, but slipped by 2 percent to 6 percent for the rest of the year.
The company said sales since then have been rebounding. Target has announced a number of measures, including paying for a year's worth of credit-report help for affected customers.
Coddingtown Mall owners Simon Property Group and Codding Investments replaced a vacant Gottschalk's store with the Target store.
