By Monica Showalter
It looks like ‘tuck’ swimwear, Satanist textile themes, and rainbow flags stamped all over the cookie-baking kits weren’t quite what consumers were looking for, based on the latest quarterly earnings report from Target.
According to CNN Business:
Target’s quarterly sales fell for the first time in six years as consumers pulled back on discretionary goods and fierce right-wing backlash to Target’s Pride Month collection took a toll on the brand.
Target’s sales at stores open for at least one year dropped 5.4% last quarter, including a 10.5% drop online. The company also cut its annual sales forecast.
Target’s foot traffic dropped 4.8% last quarter, “likely a function of a mix that skews too discretionary, as well as the Pride merchandise issues,” Michael Baker, an analyst at DA Davidson, said in a note to clients.
So things were worse than anyone thought, in the wake of the consumer boycott triggered by its Pride Month caper in June. They didn’t just see earnings come in below target, they had to lower their annual outlook for what they think their earnings will be.
Sure, their stock went up. But that’s because they lowered their bar on earnings. CNN Business noted that earnings are down 27% on the year earlier and that’s not, as the lefties say, sustainable.
Wokester attitudes were poison to making money, as companies have learned and in Target’s case, what with all the examples out there, learned the hard way.
What happened? Quite possibly they went soft during the pandemic.
Remember that during the state-enforced lockdowns, small businesses were forced to shutter while big retailers, the kind which donate to Democrats, were shielded from shutdowns, artificially boosting their profits. The prop-up maybe made Target think they were bullet-proof and with only a need to please Democrats, they could offend as many customers as they liked.
Turns out Democrats, though, are nobody’s friend in business, not even businesses that engage in crony capitalism, which Target may have been involved in a mild form of (not the Solyndra-type stuff). When the pandemic ended, they had been lulled into a sense of invincibility and let their sales game go soft as wokesters took over.
They should have known this, given the experience of Bud Light, Kohl’s and other wokester retail corporations that learned the hard way that their customers and their wants, not the “change the world” desires of their internal wokesters, came first.
But they didn’t. So they too got to learn the hard way that they are there to sell goods that the broadest possible customer base, not the loudest politically motivated special interest. They’ve been clobbered by the bottom line now for not putting their customers first. They just painted a big target on their Target.