The new hours will keep stores open until 11 p.m. or midnight on most days. Bloomberg
Target Corp.  is keeping its doors open later at more than half of its U.S. stores, hoping to snag guests who are putting off shopping until well after dark and might have gone elsewhere.
The chain's nearly 1,800 U.S. stores had typically opened at 8 a.m. and closed at 10 p.m. on weekdays and Saturdays and at 9 p.m. on Sundays. The new hours will keep stores open until 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. on Sundays and until 11 p.m. or midnight on other days. The hours will vary by store; some, for example, will only have extended hours on weekends.
Ten and 11 p.m. aren't peak times for shopping, but Target is betting that enough people will show up to make it worth keeping the lights on and registers open. The company needs every shopper it can get now to turn around a drop in U.S. traffic and in same-store sales that has gone on for more than a year.

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The new extended hours are starting this month and will be in effect through the holidays, after which they will be evaluated. Target spokesman Eric Hausman said shoppers had been asking for longer hours and that there were often a large number of shoppers in stores near closing time.
"We did a lot more analysis into how big an opportunity this is, and there is a really big opportunity here," Mr. Hausman said.
Mr. Hausman wouldn't disclose sales goals or any other projections as to how many extra shoppers the longer hours would attract.
A relatively small portion of the U.S. population shops late. At 10 p.m., 37% of people over the age of 15 are asleep and 26% are watching television, according the Labor Department's American Time Use Survey. Only 0.3% were shopping.
The peak time for consumer-goods purchases, according to the survey, is 1 p.m., when 3.8% of Americans said that is their primary activity.
Target's hours aren't nearly as convenient as its largest traditional rival, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which keeps 70% of its U.S. stores open 24 hours a day.
Big-box retailers like Target and Wal-Mart are seeing their long-successful models flounder as shoppers increasingly are choosing the convenience of shopping online or in smaller stores.
The extended hours appear to represent a gradual shift of philosophy at Target, whose former CEO, Gregg Steinhafel, ran a very conservative playbook. The retailer over the last several years has striven to protect profits, even at the expense of sales, and took fewer risks.
Target is now cutting prices in the U.S. to woo customers back, an effort that is damaging margins. The retailer earlier this month cut its outlook for the year, citing more promotions and weaker sales in Canada. It reports earnings Wednesday.
The plans to make the changes were under way well before Target's new chairman and CEO, Brian Cornell, started in the job Tuesday. He spent his first few days at Target meeting with top executives at the company's Minneapolis headquarters and speaking before thousands of employees there and in Canada.