Thoughts and prayers
Once you take away the veneer of civility, Target is just an overpriced Walmart.
I just want to take tbis moment to thank Target for their thoughtful removal of DEI policies. You see I’ve wanted to move for a really long time and my wife always had a requirement that anywhere we moved to would have a target nearby. It complicated the process. But now, I don’t have to adhere to that requirement anymore, because we don’t buy anything from them anymore. It’s great. So thanks Target for showing my wife you were a lousy bunch of scum sucking greedy pigs. I’ve known for years, but it’s nice to have proof.
Boycotts work. The naysayers are wrong once again.
Just goes to show how bending the knee to the bigot brigade doesn’t work. Are more of the fat orange traitorous fuck’s cult shopping there?
No.
Target did exactly what they wanted- first by hiding their Pride merch last June, and then by eliminating their diversity programs- and the only result is the people who didn’t shop at Target still aren’t, but the people who did shop there are taking their business elsewhere.
Soon Target’s going to have to either try to reverse course to save face with their former clientele, or they’re gonna have to double down in an effort to attract more MAGAts to their rotting corporate corpse. And as InBev learned with Dylan Mulvaney, that’s not a decision you want to fuck up.
It’s more than that. The right wing dollar doesn’t come back. They use bud light as an insult still. The queer community will be marketed to if you do right by us. Break that trust and it can be earned back. The right wing community will instead declare your product their anathema.
The queer community will be marketed to if you do right by us. Break that trust and it can be earned back.
Which is how it should go, because it give corporations incentives to do socially moral things.
they should learn the lesson from appeasing hitler with sudetlands.
Hey, I’m Czech and I do not want Target to own our borders!
InBev stock is up 1.6% over the last year. If you’d bought stocks this January, you would have made about 30% profit.
InBev is doing fine, because they own over 600 brands globally.
Bud Light sales however are not doing fine. Its sales are down about 40% compared to pre-2023 levels, and has dropped from most-popular to third most popular beer. They pissed off the no-taste mouthbreathing MAGAts who were their primary customers by mailing Dylan one fucking can, and then pissed off everyone else when they threw Dylan under the bus immediately because the MAGAts started all bleating about it.
Target is now literally in that same position.
So the boycott was pointless, as indicated. I also saw people saying they were going to boycott InBev, and they clearly had an impact for some period of time, along with the Bud Light boycotters, yet here we are. Also, you mentioned InBev, not Bud Light.
My dude, it sounds like you’re being needlessly accusative.
I never said InBev was in trouble; I said they fucked up their response to the Dylan Mulvaney backlash. Which they absolutely did, and it caused their most popular American beer brand to lose sales.
A lot of people at the time were (correctly) pointing out that most of the beers the MAGAts decided to switch to in their performative protests were also owned by InBev.
Get woke or go broke.
go fasch, lose cash
Remove DEI, DIE.
Go nazi, declare bankruptcy
Fuck Target anyway. They’ve always been a shit company. They just hide it.
15 years ago Target specialized in creating a shopping experience where the consumer could discover trendy, fun, useful items that they couldn’t find in other similar retailers. Today it’s all the same merchandise you could find anywhere and there’s no value proposition to shop at Target.
Ah yes, Target.
When you think you are too good to go to Wal-Mart, and want to pay 2x-4x the price of price for the same exact stuff.
Lots of overlap with Canadian Tire in that respect
And just like every retailer, they’ve vertically integrated their supply chain so that they can shove their bullshit brands at you
Definitely nothing to do with them being generally more expensive and people being concerned about money
Porque no los dos. There were a lot of people shopping there on autopilot. That whole Target run thing was real, you walk in get your prescription need to wait around for 30 minutes go through housewares realize you needed some chips, buy some stuff to make for dinner, now you’re walking out of there with a $300 receipt.
They’re going to have a hard time re-engaging those people.
I mean. I never shopped at a Target. So I’m doing my part.
They’re the only store around here that had a certain flavor(cherry chocolate almond) of kind ice cream bar, but I haven’t been back in a long time anyway, nor do I intend to.
We all must make Cherry Chocolate Almond sacrifices.
We used to spend a good amount of money at Target and now we won’t go anywhere near it. It was great for gift shopping and seasonal stuff but we’ve figured out better options with retailers that don’t have gross values.
So where did you shift your buying to? Hopefully not Walmart or Amazon, who are far worse. Small businesses are not available options in most of America.
We’re fortunate enough to be close to a couple major cities that have some small business options. Otherwise Costco has been a great bet like the other comment mentioned. We’re also trying to avoid Amazon more but it can be hard for some specialty items. We figure that spending less on there is still a positive step.
Costco.
Go fash lose cash
Yes im pissed at Target but if alll the extra sales are going to Walmart, that’s worse.
Costco has increased foot traffic for 13 consecutive weeks, so not a bad guess people are going there.
You should be shopping at Costco by default anyway. They are awesome. There are a ton of membership benefits beyond just shopping at the warehouse! (Costco Next, HVAC deals, auto financing, etc). You can sometimes pay for your entire membership with one transaction.
Costco also treat workers better.
Ain’t got no Costco to go to personally. I go to a regional chain, but I am suspicious of the prices sometimes (why are the 12 packs of sodas often on sale for 14.88?)
I do the same but try to hit up Aldi instead of the regional brand. I know the regional brand has shitty practices regarding unions but sometimes I want name-brand products or things that Aldi just doesn’t carry due to their smaller footprint
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I was talking about the prices at the regional chain I go to, not at Costco.
I’m two hours from a Costco here in TN. I had a membership when I lived in Philly and loved it.
Looks like its down slightly too.
Nope both are being protested against.
TBF, Target largely brought this on themselves before the DEI stuff. They’re more expensive here than a proper dept store, and everything is locked in plastic and takes forever to get.
Can’t boycott what I already wasn’t using.
You were just ahead of the boycott curve!
yup, and eliminated your instore brands, for cheapflation and shrinkflationed items. now its replaced by dealworth items.
Is the goal general harm, or directed harm that may have a positive result? If Target changes course and takes a moral stand (even if that decision isn’t made for all the right reasons), that’s worth more than hurting Target and Walmart equally.
I get that. And I hope that Target changes before it’s too late and you are correct.
Yeah this is a terribley stupid plan. Give Walmart a monopoly an objectively worse company
target was suppose to be where walmart refuse to build, basically it was a “bougie verison” of walmart.
Every company/university that’s dropped DEI has done so under political terrorism. NOT ONE has said it cost them money, was ineffective, inefficient, a waste of resources, “didn’t align with their values” or any other scapegoat reasoning.
I’m not letting them off the hook, though. They were still cowards for giving in to the political pressure, and I’m glad they’re having regrets.
I disagree that they’ve all done it under political duress. I think many of these companies have used the political environment to be shitty, and drop something they didn’t want to support.
I think it’s just like Republicans over the past 12+ years. Once Trump came along and normalized hate speech, it’s empowered other wastes-of-oxygen to do the same. They’ve always been racists and bigots, but now it’s acceptable to do it publicly. I try to do my part by calling it out when I can. Silence is complacency, so I’m all in on name and shame in the moment.
It’s not that there wasn’t any political pressure. It’s that the slightest bit of pressure caused them to pull the plug swiftly.
I think the companies who were led by people personally antagonistic to DEI already weren’t doing it. They started it when the political winds were in favor of DEI, found that it did something beneficial for them that was worth the investment (ultimately, increasing profits, probably through PR) and reaped what they could. But the slightest headwinds caused them to drop it, for lack of confidence it would be worth the continued investment. For others, it was beneficial enough this pressure didn’t change their decisions.
None of this is likely coming from company leaders caring about DEI for some sort of principled reason, just companies who care about only one thing, reassessing the value of DEI in terms of that one thing, $ return on spend. This is a group who needs subtler treatment than the anti-DEI crowd, this is fair weather friends who don’t care. What little we can do is reward those who don’t give in to the slightest push.
Honestly, I’m so damn pessimistic anymore that I default to the preparator being intentionally malicious. I’ve been burned too many times. You’re definitely right though, I just hate that it’s a thing. It’s nauseating.
So it’s important to remember that companies are not, by and large, moral. They exist for three reasons: to get the money, to get the money, and to get the money. Almost every choice a company makes is in service of that goal.
They are rarely, if ever, going to take moral stands, and it is useless to look at them through the lens of leading a moral crusade. Instead, it is better to look at them as a barometer of public opinion.
Politicians will say anything. Polls can be manipulated. But companies won’t bother with that slight-of-hand nonsense. They want money, and therefore they want people shopping with them as much as possible. And so they will do whatever they think will get them the most business.
50 years ago, can you imagine a business even uttering the term LGBTQ? It would have gotten them crucified. So they didn’t. Now LGBTQ rights are popular with the majority of Americans, so they make it part of their brand.
This thing with Target shows what happens when they get it wrong. And they really, really don’t like being wrong.
mainly because of vindictiveness of the trump administration.
