Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
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What led to Target's recent boycott?
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It's Sunday, May 18th. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is a special episode of What's New Sunday. On a recent Sunday afternoon, I, along with producer Jess Jupiter, visited a Target store in Brooklyn.
So we're here in Atlantic Terminal, standing in front of the Target. There are a lot of people coming in and out. It's Sunday, it's nice out, New Yorkers are happy, and the store is kind of hopping.
I say it's booming.
Yeah. All right. All right. Let's go check it out. Let's go.
We took a walk around the store to get a sense of what was going on. People were waiting to try on clothes and grabbing seasonal items for Easter. Near the registers, we did my favorite thing, looking into people's carts to check out their haul. Organization, cleaning.
Snacks. Snacks, yeah. Not so many clothes, actually.
We talked to a few customers outside the store.
What do you buy? Everything. Uh-huh, go on. Like, literally everything.
We bought, you know, some milk, some diapers for her.
I just needed a really cheap, like, hamburger. I just want a chocolate. I just want it. I just need it. But we weren't really there to shop. We were there to see how many other people were there to shop. See, a few days into the Trump administration, Target dropped some of its goals for diversity, equity, and inclusion and ended its program to boost Black suppliers. At the time, the company said that it was making the moves with the goal of driving growth and staying in step with the evolving external landscape. As a result of Target dropping its DEI goals, a number of customers have said they are no longer shopping there. It was all over TikTok.
Target, the boycott is forever. Forever. I have rerouted my shopping needs to other places.
Target, y'all have messed up so bad. that y'all have managed to turn this boycott into a breakup.
It's not just individuals either. A civil rights lawyer out of Minneapolis launched a nationwide boycott right outside Target's main offices. A Baptist pastor at a predominantly Black church near Atlanta says that by Easter, he got 200,000 people to commit to stop shopping at Target. And Nina Turner, a former state senator from Ohio, organized a boycott, too.
The message is there is power in your purchase, that we will form solidarity one to another and let corporations like Target know that we will not shop where there is not leadership when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion.
So what's got them so upset? After all, Target was one of many companies that changed its policies and language around DEI in the past year under pressure from conservative activists and later perceived legal threats from the Trump administration. Last July, farm equipment seller Deere said it would remove socially motivated messages from company training materials and policies. I reached out to Deere for comment but didn't hear back. In November, Walmart announced that it was winding down its nonprofit center for racial equity. A Walmart spokesman told me that the company's five-year commitment made in 2020 will be fulfilled. But for years, Target had made inclusivity a key part of its story, how it communicated to customers and how it differentiated itself from competitors. Sarah Nassauer covers Target for The Journal.
Like a lot of large companies, Target talked about diversity as something that They hope to focus on more. They wanted more diversity. And it wasn't just about, like, doing good. It was a business imperative. This idea that if you have more diverse viewpoints on your team, you're going to come up with better ideas. It's going to be more equitable in terms of who gets jobs at the company.
How did Target's DEI policies evolve?
Retailers are a consumer-facing business, right? You're going to be able to attract a more diverse customer base because you'll have people coming up with ideas that reflect your customer base. That sort of is, in general, how they and lots of other companies have talked about it over the years.
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