Though Target stores have seen a surge in purchases of cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and pantry staples, other categories have not fared as well, prompting the retailer to withdraw its full-year guidance. Yahoo! Finance's Melody Hahm joins The Final Round to discuss.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Now a company that has been benefiting as well from, you know, the kind of trend in online shopping not just, you know, in the last couple of weeks but over the last few years is Target. Now that stock is lower today, but Melody Hahm, they came out today and gave really strong numbers in terms of what Target's comp sales looked like. But I think, again, everyone is so quick-- the company comes out and withdraws its guidance, right-- because everyone is so quick to say oh, great, this is the company benefiting from the coronavirus trends that took place in two weeks here in the States. But on the other side of this, we're still likely looking at an economy that's in recession, and it's going to be difficult for Target, even as strong as they are, to navigate that environment.

MELODY HAHM: Yes, Myles, when we talk about winning here, I feel like we have to have an asterisk. There has to be a disclosure and a disclaimer and a caveat because, at this point, winning is not really winning. And I think the CEO of Target, Brian Cornell, laid that out pretty aptly because, you know, we're so quick to say, oh, you're really benefiting from this obsession with buying Clorox wipes and getting hand sanitizer and trying to get fresh groceries as often as possible before there is a potential lockdown where we may not even be able to kind of saunter around freely as such.

But Brian Cornell did lay out that the higher-margin products like accessories, like apparel are not selling, right? People are just going to the store and ordering online for things that are very cheap to make and actually do not really affect their bottom line in a material way.

So to your point, even withdrawing guidance, looking into the future of 2020-- Cornell said that they're seeing a bump right now. But as you look ahead even a month from now, even three months from now, at the end of 2020 there's no anticipation of what it expects. We don't know if families will cut out costs entirely and budgets. Thinking about the holiday season, maybe there won't be extravagant presents. Maybe there won't be as many toys because a lot of kids are home right now and they instead would be buying toys for them now. So I think there's a lot of trade-offs that we're not really fully baking into account when we're having this conversation.

And as Dan was mentioning, Nike also withdrawing their guidance. Target also joining that rank, that growing bucket, which includes MasterCard, Twitter, Best Buy. Just because even some of these companies that we kind of instinctively think are winning in this battle right now-- ultimately I don't think these executives want to be promising anything to investors believing that this could be tenable for the foreseeable future.

And then I just want to point out one thing. Remember when Target acquired Shipt, which is that online delivery service, Cornell did say that he's not changing the pace of hiring when it comes to Target employees overall, but they did hire some contracted workers there. So we talk a lot about the gig economy and the changing structure that we're seeing as people are not able to take those Uber rides, as people are not able to stay at Airbnbs. Perhaps there will be this kind of complete repivot and reversal, and maybe people will start working at big-box stores again, which we're already seeing with the hiring coming from Walmart and Amazon and Costco.

So, Myles, we talk about the new economy. What's old is new, and what's new is perhaps not going to be here to stay.

DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, and let me just add to what Melody said. There was an interesting point from Target today separate from what they're doing financially, which is that while they're staying open amid coronavirus, now taking very extreme measures to clean the stores and keep customers six feet apart. Our colleague Brian Sozzi wrote about this today. Target and Kroger doing something similar. Kroger setting up plexiglass partitions at all of its cash registers, and Target now assigning specific store workers to do the role of keeping customers who are in line six feet apart. And, of course, maybe that seems obvious, but it took a while to start to see chains do this.

And the reason that interested me so much, I do think that, whether it's weeks or months, that is going to become the new blueprint for the few chains, regardless of what kind of store-- whether it's a CVS, a pharmacy, whether it's a grocery store. That's going to become the blueprint that all other stores that are still open during this time have to follow because you kind of have to take those very extreme measures to make people feel comfortable coming into the store. So another interesting thing that Target, I think, is leading on.