Target Is Now Open in Forney: What's Inside the Village at Gateway Store
It’s open. After two-plus years of dirt, steel, and speculation, Target is now open in Forney at The Village at Gateway, at 11520 E US Highway 80. The store soft-opened in late July 2026 and held its formal grand opening the following weekend.
This is the first Target in Forney, and for most of the city it replaces a 20–30 minute drive to Mesquite, Rockwall, or Garland with a five-minute one.
The Basics
- Address: 11520 E US Highway 80, Forney, TX 75126
- Size: roughly 148,000 square feet — a full-format store, not a small-format urban Target
- Staff: about 200 team members, most of them hired locally
- Location: The Village at Gateway, US-80 at FM 460, the same center as H-E-B and Home Depot
What’s Actually Inside
The Forney store got the full build-out rather than a stripped-down version:
- CVS Pharmacy — prescriptions without a separate stop
- Starbucks café — right inside the front doors
- Target Optical — eye exams and glasses
- Disney Store at Target — one of the shop-in-shop concepts, which is a bigger deal to Forney parents than the press release makes it sound
- Full grocery, apparel, home, seasonal, and electronics departments
- Order Pickup and Drive Up, which is the part most local families will use hardest
The Part Nobody Mentions: Traffic
The first few weekends are going to be rough. Gateway now has Target, H-E-B, Home Depot, and a Costco fuel station drawing traffic onto the same stretch of US-80 that’s already under expansion construction.
If you’re trying to actually get in and out:
- Weekday mornings before 10 AM are the calmest stretch by a wide margin.
- Weeknights after 8 PM are the second-best window.
- Saturday between 11 AM and 3 PM is the worst. Use Drive Up if you can.
We wrote a whole guide to batching Saturday errands around Gateway — it’s more useful now than when we published it.
How Target Fits a Forney Grocery Routine
Target grocery is not a full H-E-B replacement, and it doesn’t need to be. What it’s genuinely good at:
- Good & Gather staples — Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, rotisserie chicken, frozen vegetables, egg whites
- Protein bars and shakes at prices that beat gas-station convenience buys
- Pantry basics you forgot on the big shop
What it’s not great at: fresh meat and seafood variety, produce depth, and bulk pricing. For those, H-E-B and BJ’s still win — see our H-E-B high-protein shopping list and Costco vs. BJ’s comparison.
A reasonable Forney routine now looks like: H-E-B for fresh, a wholesale club for bulk, Target for the mid-week gap-fill. Three stores, all within a mile of each other, none of them requiring a highway trip out of town.
What This Means for Forney
Kaufman County has been the fastest-growing county in Texas, and until recently the retail hadn’t caught up with the rooftops. A 148,000-square-foot Target is the clearest signal yet that it has. It also means roughly 200 new jobs, a meaningful bump in local sales tax, and one less reason to spend a Saturday morning on US-80 headed west.
Ross, Burlington, Bath & Body Works, and James Avery all opened in the same stretch of summer, with BJ’s Wholesale and EVO Entertainment still to come. See our Village at Gateway opening calendar, which we keep updated.
The Honest Fitness Angle
Here’s the thing about a town getting more convenient: convenience is neutral. It gives you back time. What you do with that time is the whole question.
The 40 minutes you used to spend driving to the Mesquite Target is now genuinely free. That’s a full workout — not a rushed one, a real one. Most people who fall off a fitness routine don’t quit because they stopped caring. They quit because the drive was too long, the day got away from them, and the gym was the easiest thing to cut.
We’ve been at 127 E US Highway 80 in Forney for over 25 years, on the same corridor as Gateway. That’s deliberate. If your grocery run, your hardware store, and your Target are all on one road, your gym should be on it too. A workout that’s already on your route home actually happens.
Stop in after your next Target run. Weekday hours start at 5 AM, there’s a supervised Kids Zone for members with kids, and you can tour the place in ten minutes.
Questions? Call (972) 564-0909 or stop by.