Per Betteridge's law, no.
> A Target spokesperson confirmed to Modern Retail that the company that runs the Bullseye Deals account does buy salvage merchandise from Target and sells it.
> Target doesn’t control this Bullseye Deals inventory, but it is aware that its reverse logistics partner is doing this.
I understand there's a legal distinction, but there's so little practical difference that you'd be hard pressed to explain the distinction to a layperson.
Unless maybe you got hurt by a defective item and tried to sue Target for damages. I assume this scheme is intended to insulate Target from that possibility, their lawyers would argue that you'd have to sue Bullseye Deals, LLC which has negligible assets, not their multi-billion-dollar corporation..
The article doesn't make any claims about exclusivity for target selling or this company buying. I didn't spend a lot of time looking, but I don't think the trademark claim is very strong either. Target's logo is a red circle surrounded by a white/transparent circle, surrounded by another red circle (bullseye). Their trademark application says "The mark consists of concentric circles representing a target or bullseye design." This seller's logo is a silhouette of white bull in a red circle.
There's some similar elements, but I don't think there's confusion. Target is affiliated with bullseyes, and uses bullseye in some of its trademarks, but the word bullseye by itself is not a trademark of Target.
From the article:
> Bullseye Deals technically falls into this latter category, though it is branded in a way that at least hints at it being associated with Target. Sources tell Modern Retail that all the listings are salvage merchandise from Target that’s been purchased by the reverse supply chain services company Liquidity Services, Inc.
> A Target spokesperson confirmed to Modern Retail that the company that runs the Bullseye Deals account does buy salvage merchandise from Target and sells it. Liquidity Services, Inc. did not respond to a request for comment.
"Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: 'Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.' It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist . . . . It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not."