Oy. All kinds of headlines about Target being in trouble over the last few days, and everyone's got a hot take that misses the central issue. I saw one piece (that I'm not linking because I don't want to embarrass the writer) that said that Target's plummeting sales, plus Walmart seeing an uptick in higher-SES customers buying food from Walmart, indicated that a recession is coming. Now yes, it's probable that a recession is bearing down on us. (I wouldn't rule out stagflation, honestly.) But what's also happening is that the people who are livid about Target abandoning DEI continue to be angry and boycott Target, and they're turning to Walmart to buy the groceries they used to buy at Target.
Wait a minute, Magda, you say. If they hate Target then they must really hate Walmart because Walmart is so bad with labor. Of course. But people are SO ANGRY at Brian Cornell and Target that they are boycotting to punish them. And it's clear that their lack of purchasing at Walmart these many years* hasn't hurt Walmart any, so buying stuff they need at Walmart doesn't feel as slimy as going to Target would right now, from an impact perspective.
Brian Cornell's response to this crisis he caused by flamboyantly abandoning DEI was to first meet with Al Sharpton, and then fire two women in upper management at Target. Clearly Cornell doesn't get out of his office much. I love Rev. Al as much as the next person, but we all have to admit that he's not really a representative of The Black Community in 2025. He probably had some good advice for Cornell about being a decent person and actually paying attention, but he's not bringing along people under 50 as a constituency.
And doubling down on rejecting DEI by firing two women looks horrible and is going to make former Target loyalists hate Cornell and the organization even more, but it's also just about the worst strategic move possible from an "understanding your business" perspective. I'm willing to bet that Cornell was largely unfamiliar with Target stores when he became CEO in 2014. And I'm willing to bet that the two women he's firing could have sketched one of the two mirror layouts of a Target store on the back of a napkin before they were hired at Target. Women are the core Target customer. Yes, men go to Target. But they go to buy specific things. Women live in Target. So Cornell is telling the world yet again that he rejects the Target customer.
When I first started noticing 8 or 9 years ago that Target was slipping because they have no people management strategy for stores, I thought they might figure it out. But then they started rejecting their core customers in addition to rejecting their core employees and it got weird. The pandemic didn't help, of course, except that Costco and some other retailers dug in to customers and came out of the pandemic looking like heroes while Target didn't. So it's been extra-crushing to see that Target didn't respond to the blood in the water around Amazon by digging in to employees and customers, maximizing the Circle Card (fka RedCard), buying Joann and creating a perfectly-complementary DIY brand to Target's ready-made merchandise, and just generally being the good guy.
Either Cornell needs to get smarter, they need to oust Cornell and put in a woman who's actually a Target customer as CEO, or they should just let the whole operation die in a death spiral.
* I'm 52 years old and I've been into Walmart twice in my life. One time I was sent in specifically to get another skein of yarn for my mother.
Spot on. They should definitely oust the CEO. The fact that they were paying him over 77 M previously is mind blowing. What did he bring to the table to deserve 77.5 M? He does not even deserve the 9 M he is getting now.