Had no idea a boycott was happening.
It couldn’t come at a worse time for the company
Neither could their capitulation to Trumps bigoted rhetoric.
I got a lot of flak and eye rolls from my liberal friends a few years ago when I, as a queer woman, would criticize their Rainbow Capitalism. But Target is not an ally, they never were. They are simply a corporation that got some easy publicity in liberal spaces by showing the bare minimum decency.
Fair weather allies, aren’t.
Can we add bigger offenders like Wal-Mart and Amazon?
That is the part that pisses me off so much about this. Yes. Target capitulated. Yes, Target needs to be told that’s not good.
BUT WALTONS FUND THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION!
This can’t be said enough, yet we can’t get a days boycott on them for fucks sake!
Right? And why not just boycott all pubkically traded companies forever? 40 days doesn’t do much
Because if you propose that, no one is actually going to do it.
Doing something is always more impactful than shooting for everything and ending up doing nothing. This is a great example of a smartly thought out mass movement; it has a specific goal, and a clearly defined set of terms. Remember, you can always expand or extend. It’s far better to get a small thing moving than try to build a big thing that you never finish.
Also, 40 days is long enough that some people are going to change their shopping habits on a more permanent basis. Creating even a longer impact on Target.
I don’t get why anyone complains about fixed term boycotts anyway. You can just add another 40 days if Target doesn’t get the message. It’s not like you’re signing a contract or something. Boycotts are a negotiation, and in negotiation you always leave yourself wiggle room.
People love to get into this “Only the biggest possible action and nothing else” mindset, and then never actually take any action at all.
The one day ones are fairly pointless, but 40 is good. Give it a month and if nothing changes then you have a bit more time to try to extend it.
Further, a lot of dirt poor people literally rely on Walmart because Walmart was successful at gutting every other business out of their already dirt poor areas. That was literally Walmart’s business model to undersell the competition until they were the only game in town, it’s how they got so huge so fast. Large swathes of the South are like that. There’s a reason they teach their employees how to sign up for food stamps.
100%, perfect is the enemy of good. But it makes little logical sense to give any of these corporations any money or data
If you’re on the highway, need a coffee, and Starbucks is the only thing around, buy the Starbucks.
If Amazon is the only place you can buy that thing you need, buy it from Amazon.
There are plenty of times when the bad option is the only good option. If we teach people that boycotts have to be all or nothing - if we get into this mindset that a single latte means you’re an evil monster who supports genocide - we just engineer a state of despair.
But if we encourage people to reduce rather than cut out, we set an easily achievable goal. And that means it’s a goal that a lot more people will strive for.
If you want to cut out every big corporation entirely from your life, that’s an admirable personal goal, but not one that seems easy or achievable to most people.
Better than these one day protests that LITERALLY do nothing. At least a 40 day boycott would hit a fiscal month, vs a single day outlier protest.
I’m definitely with you on that in spirit. I would starve if I actually practiced that across the board. I figure if we start from the top down, maybe we can get the co-ops to come back. Our neighborhood co-op grocery closed down not too long ago, and all that’s left are national chains.
I think it’s fair to commit to reducing your purchasing from these large entities significantly. By design, these companies have made it basically impossible to get certain products except from them, so do what you need to do in those cases. But you can get a lot still from alternatives.
I’m a huge advocate of what I call “soft boycotting.” You don’t have to all or nothing this stuff. If a million people reduce their spending on a company by only ten percent, that’s just as much damage as ten thousand people dropping them entirely. And it’s a lot easier to get a million people to reduce their spending by a little than it is to get ten thousand people to go cold turkey.
Remember, perfect is the enemy of good. A small action taken is worth far more than a big action only imagined.
Dear capitalist media… Target is being boycotted for being racist. And no, Target is not the victim.
These headlines ffs…
It’s CNN. They’re a heavily biased pro-Israel pro-capitalist align-with-whatever-regime corpo news service. They should just be ignored by all at this point.
Wait, Target’s racist?
They canceled their black creator products and rolled back DEI because the government said to.
Some people can argue that’s not racism, but they’re likely the same people that argue that Elon wasn’t giving a Nazi salute.
Remember there are bots even on Lemmy to push the narrative that we have no power. Billionaires aren’t scared of a couple less dollars, but they are TERRIFIED of us figuring out we can organize. Let’s not fight each other let’s fight the oligarchy!
these short boycotts won’t fuck them on dollars, but there is a potential benefit: just in time economics and these long slow prediction-powered supply chains cannot handle this shit.
Also, I’ve heard a rumor about Target trying to stuff as much as they can into their warehouses and stock rooms in advance of Trump’s tariffs.
that’s so cool! yeah, fuck them if they want to try to play both sides here. they want to bow, they can suffer the king’s horrible policies.
We only have power when a large enough group of us does something. Anything else is publicity.
Every time I’ve gone into a target in the last 5 years, they legit looked like they were closing down. Idk why people are boycotting them in particular when Walmart and Amazon are way worse.
Same, I get major K-Mart in its final days vibes: lots of empty shelves, stuff in dented and torn packaging, hostile and surly employees etc. etc.
Browsing through the Target grocery section has always mystified me. Not great selection and everything costs about 50% more than the local grocery stores. I have never understood why anybody would shop there for groceries.
The Rite Aid near us actually was 3/4 empty all through the pandemic. They put up a sign saying they were remodeling, but closed a few months ago.
Drug stores are so fucking weird. It’s a business model that apparently supports a store on every corner, yet they often go out of business too. And it’s always Rite Aids going out of business, although I couldn’t say what the difference is between those and the other chains.
there’s only a couple of companies that run every drug store in the us. both cvs and walgreens each own over a dozen other names that they operate as depending on where in the country you are.
same thing with grocery stores. Kroger and Safeway also both own over a dozen names that they operate under.
I believe rite aid is owned by walgreens.
A long time ago, i woked at a savers (thrift store), which also operated as a dozen other names depending on region. Makes me think that maybe someone could make a bot that could identify a person’s geographic location based on the brands mentioned in their comments.
Why are people boycotting a company that tried and took a step back due to backlash instead of supporting them when they tried?
The article certainly outlines a few reasons:
- Target “embraced” the idea of rolling back DEI policies more than many companies, furthering its weird cultish “belonging to the bullseye” internal culture.
- Target’s customers are more progressive than Walmart, John Deere, or Ford, so more of them actually care about what the company is doing.
- Target previous embraced DEI more than other companies. Them previously doing so and then promptly shedding it seems that their corporate culture is one of quarterly gains rather than giving a shit about anybody. While that’s true for pretty much all publicly traded corporations, see point 2.
Target throwing themselves at
Rainbow Capitalismis one pile of evidence that points at their movement being on the whim of the dollar as opposed to strong corporate ethics
I used to pretty regularly shop at target. When they rolled back DEI proactively for trump, I stopped.
I had heard about the boycott, but didn’t realize this was the reason. Target’s on the other side of town from me so I don’t shop there anyway, but yeah definitely not going there at all now. Fuck them.
It’s “funny” how capitalist media will talk about the boycott and cry agonized tears for Target…
But never mention the “why”, especially not in headlines.
