Target is learning that its efforts to please Donald Trump and the GOP have done nothing to improve its bottom line while generating worse "real consequences," reports Ariel Messman-Rucker for Yahoo Finance. It is beset by lawsuits and its share price is going nowhere good.
Last month, Target joined major corporations across the country who have been rolling back diversity initiatives in the wake of President Donald Trump taking power. The company also issued a memo that said it would end its Racial Equity Action and Change program and will be "stopping all external diversity-focused surveys including HRC's Corporate Equality index," the Advocate reports. … Target shareholders, led by the City of Riviera Beach Police Pension Fund in Florida, filed a class action lawsuit, claiming Target defrauding them by "artificially inflated" stock prices and failing to warn inventors about how removing DEI and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) policies could cause stock prices to plummet, Forbes reports. The lawsuit also says that Target concealed the backlash it suffered from the May 2023 Pride Month campaign after the company removed the LGBTQ+ merchandise after confrontations happened in stores.
The legal spitroast appears to be that Target both concealed the risk of DEI initiatives and concealed the negative consequences of ending them abruptly.
Corporate wokeness can never be trusted because corporations are legal fictions which exist to make profits and insulate shareholders from liability—you can't trust them any more than you can trust a falling leaf to land in a bird's nest. But if you imagine a spectrum of corporate diversity efforts running from "cynically exploiting sentiment for short-term marketing gain" to "earnest innovation with an eye to long-term growth," Target appeared to be on the level—until it suddenly rushed to stand among the biggest corporate cowards of them all. Whatever you think they should or should not do, the lesson is that whoever you are trying to please will still hate you after you give it up to them, but you will also lose your friends.
I can't help but think that Target thinking its customer base of middle class suburbanites was turning away from DEI is the result of elite media turning away from DEI. The floating world of news and opinion poses itself as the voice of that demographic but the reality is DEI is quite popular with the sort of people who shop at Target. Even when the questions nudge respondents, even after months of hostile reportage, DEI remained above water in polls. Media assuming that hiring minorities, veterans and the disabled is some démodé leftist fad is a symptom of journos and pundits wakesurfing right-wing social media.
