Target Sales Plummet After Bowing To Trump's Anti-diversity Crusade

Major retailer Target announced on Tuesday that its earnings have significantly declined over the last year and that it had missed Wall Street estimates for the most recent quarter. The decline comes less than six months after the company adopted a hostile approach to diversity, echoing President Donald Trump.

Sales dropped 3% from a year ago while transactions at physical stores and online declined. When customers bought from Target they spent less and visits to stores fell as well.

CEO Brian Cornell told investors and reporters on an earnings call the struggles are due to “ongoing pressure in our discretionary business, plus five consecutive months of declining consumer confidence, tariff uncertainty and the reaction to the updates we shared on belonging in January.”

The “updates” from January are a reference to the Jan. 24 announcement—just four days after Trump’s inauguration—that the company would be pulling back on its diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

In a memo sent to Target employees, the company said it was going to put a stop to its DEI goals, kill a program that featured products from minority-owned businesses in its stores, and cease reporting to the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. Originally, Target had said the killing of George Floyd, which occurred in the company’s home base of Minneapolis, Minnesota, had been a motivating factor in expanding diversity outreach.

The Target rollback occurred at the same time that Trump signed a slew of executive orders meant to roll back civil rights progress, done under the guise of alleging that DEI had gone too far.

There was a swift negative reaction to Target’s decisions. Rev. Jamal Bryant, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, organized a “Target Fast” beginning in March. The boycott called on Black Americans to withhold their spending from the company in a demonstration of Black purchasing power.

In addition to Target, other companies that pulled back on DEI efforts following Trump’s election have also been targeted, including Walmart and Meta (Facebook).

Target was then sued in February by shareholders who said the company’s leadership misled them on the risks involved in experiencing boycotts from pulling away from their pro-minority positions.

By April, reports began to emerge that foot traffic at Target stores were down.

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Cornell has attempted to manage the fallout by meeting with civil rights activists like the Rev. Al Sharpton, but so far the company has not turned back from its Trump-style approach to diversity.

Target is facing headwinds because of Trump’s haphazard tariff policy and the negative economic effect of those ideas rippling through the economy, but it made things worse by adopting Trump’s anti-diversity bigotry as well.

That decision is proving to be very bad for business.