Dock 1 outlet becomes mainstay for bargain hunters

Dock 1 liquidation outlet in Hopkins isn't well known yet, which is the way a lot of bargain hunters like it.

Irwin Jacobs of Jacobs Trading Co., the Twin Cities king of liquidation, opened the store in 2017. A couple of months ago he formulated a new way of clearing out the tons of e-commerce merchandise Americans return to online retailers.

"People who are looking for a bargain can find small electronics, toys, household goods and seasonal items," he said. "Everything in the bins is $5 on Mondays, $4 on Tuesdays, $3 on Wednesdays, $2 on Thursdays and $1 on Fridays and Saturdays."

A garage saler's delight, the store gets regulars on Mondays to scout out the deals and grab something that's likely to be gone later in the week. Maybe it's a rainfall shower head, a kid's karaoke microphone, a coffee press or a portable humidifier.

"We go through 10,000 to 12,000 units a week, maybe more," Jacobs said.

Betsy Sherman of Maple Grove shopped the two e-commerce bins Monday and found housewares and Bluetooth cellphone accessories.

"Sometimes you find good deals, but it can take more than an hour to search," she said.

Dock 1 staff restock the bins continuously. With nearly 30 percent of online purchases returned, according to Worldwide Business Research, the bins stay full.

The $5-4-3-2-1 bins make up a small part of Dock 1. Most of the warehouse is filled with clearance furniture and, to a lesser extent, big-screen TVs. Jacobs said the TVs came from a retailer that recently closed. Most of the big screens are 2017 models still in the box, and the prices often beat Black Friday deals. A Samsung 55-inch 4K model MU8000 is $699, for example. Best Buy and BHPhotoVideo featured it for $898 on Black Friday last year.

Online price comparisons are still worth the time. Most of the Dock 1 TVs were priced lower than online, but not all. The Vizio D43-E2 set for $299 is $279 at Walmart.com.

Dock 1 is open weekdays and one or two Saturdays a month, including this Saturday. It is closed Sundays.

JOHN EWOLDT

On Monday, in a conference call after announcing quarterly results, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai mentioned Target's growing use of its cloud services, saying it was "migrating three areas of its business," though without more specification.

The following day, Target Chief Information Officer Mike McNamara gave the opening address at a conference in San Francisco for customers of Google's cloud services. Target.com is now run entirely off cloud systems of Google rather than servers that Target controls itself.

The change began to happen in 2016, in the months after Target endured an embarrassing system failure of its website during Cyber Monday 2015, the Monday after Thanksgiving that is the busiest day of the year for e-commerce in the United States.

"Shortly after launching our Cyber Monday offers, we began seeing contention on a key database. There was nothing we could do save throttle traffic to the side and limp through the rest of the day," he said. In the process, Target upset thousands of customers and lost tens of millions in orders that day.

On Cyber Monday 2016, traffic to Target's website again began to stretch the limits of the company's ability to respond. By then, however, the company was relying on cloud services, and its engineers only needed to order up more server capacity.

Target has relied on a variety of cloud computing providers, including Amazon Web Services, a unit of its retail rival Amazon.com Inc. But pressed by Target's engineers, the company has shifted the majority of it to Google Cloud, McNamara said.

He also described some of the work Target developers are doing with artificial intelligence, noting that, while such technology is perceived to be for cutting-edge ideas, it's often used to make routine tasks better. One example: AI is helping Target categorize products for online orders, replacing some work that was done by photographers who take pictures of the goods Target sells.

With them, McNamara said, a bikini top sometimes gets categorized as a bikini bottom. "Photographers are arty types," he said, "and it turns out that accurate data entry is not high on their list of priorities."

"There is a lot of hype in the market about cloud and AI," McNamara told the audience at the Google event. "But if you cut through the hype, there is real substance there."