Target founder Douglas Dayton dies at 88 (also uncle of MN Gov. Mark Dayton)

Article by: NEAL ST. ANTHONY , Star Tribune
Updated: July 6, 2013 - 10:32 PM

Douglas Dayton began the remaking of his family’s company and helped reinvent American retailing when he launched the first Target stores in 1962.

The former Dayton’s Department Store executive and Twin Cities philanthropist died Saturday at the age of 88 after a months-long battle with cancer.

The youngest of the five Dayton brothers who took over their father’s eponymous department store in downtown Minneapolis in the 1940s, Dayton got his start in the business after wartime service as a sergeant in an infantry division that won him the Purple Heart and attending college at Amherst.

The Dayton brothers “were damn good department store merchants in our heyday,” Dayton recalled in a May interview. He served as a store manager, taking note along the way of the rise of discounter Kmart and the threat it and others posed to full-service department stores.

Dayton was an early proponent of the family trying its hand at the discount business. In 1960, he and a like-minded Dayton’s merchandiser were charged with planning the launch of what became Target.

full: http://www.startribune.com/local/214499011.html