Once the Target store opened on Putty Hill Avenue in Towson in 1998, I shopped there pretty much once a week. It was part of my shopping routine, and I liked the place despite its slipshod management. (How can employees fail to notice that no shopping carts are available in the store? How can managers not think to send someone out to the corrals in the parking lot to bring the carts in?) I liked the variety of customers: a number of elderly white parties like me, lots of young people, especially students, Black customers, gay customers, a mix.
Then, a year ago this month, the corporation abruptly dropped its DEI initiatives. Not being a party to corporate deliberations, I can't think why a company that depended on a multicultural customer base would cease efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion, unless they imagined, with the incoming second Trump administration, they had a shot at luring Trump supporters from Walmart.
They miscalculated. There was an immediate call for a boycott, which I joined and have maintained. (I wrote to corporate headquarters and was, of course, ignored.) They lost substantial business, sacked employees, and eventually said goodbye to the CEO responsible for the fiasco. And that is exactly what should happen to a company that betrays its most loyal customers. I gather that Target is now trying to reestablish itself with a focus on affordability--"prioritize value perception" in the jargon. But I'm skeptical.
I recall Baltimore Sun publisher Mike Waller explaining a group of managers the consequences of a failed circulation campaign: "You lose money, it's just money. You make more money. But you lose TEN THOUSAND SUBSCRIBERS, you're never getting those people back." And we never did.
Mind you, maintaining my principles has been inconvenient. To get the things I need, I've had to add additional stores, some of them farther away, to the weekly routine. And I'm skeptical about the utility of boycotts as well. Chick-fil-A appears to be doing bang-up business despite never having received a dime or a dollar from me. There's also the history of failed crackpot right-wing consumer boycotts over the past forty years: Remember the uproar over Procter & Gamble's supposedly Satanic logo?
Somehow, though, "forget how nasty we were to Blacks and gays and women, because we're really, really cheap now" isn't the seductive appeal Target seems to think it is.
