(LifeSiteNews) – Retail giant Target’s quarterly sales have fallen for the first time in six years amid ongoing hostility to the company’s forays into “woke ideology.”
CNN reported that the company’s sales (excluding new locations open for less than a year) declined 5.4% in the latest quarter and its online sales fell 10.5%. Target stock did rise 5% on Wednesday morning, though overall it is down 27% from last year.
Analyst Michael Baker attributed the news to both a product “mix that skews too discretionary” at a time when overall consumers are said to be spending less on non-essential goods, “as well as the Pride merchandise issues.”
For years, Target has signaled fealty to the LGBT movement, an issue that was reignited this year when it publicly declared its support for LGBT lobbying group GLSEN, which advocates for comprehensive integration of pro-LGBT themes in public education, including sexually explicit books, began selling LGBT-themed apparel for children, including infants, sparking a conservative boycott.
The company pulled a few of the most extreme items from shelves in response to pressure but has not cut ties to LGBT activists. A federal lawsuit on behalf of a Target shareholder accuses the company of “misleading representations about its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) mandates, and for causing Target shareholders to lose billions of dollars.”
“The strong reaction to this year’s Pride assortment” was a factor, Target chief growth officer Christina Hennington admitted this week. “The reaction is a signal for us to pause, adapt and learn.” However, the company is still not yet willing to abandon “pride” entirely and is instead mulling “potential changes to timing, placement in stores and the mix of brands it sells,” according to CNN.
The situation is part of a broader trend of controversy over major U.S. corporations getting involved in left-wing social causes at the behest of media and activist pressure to embrace business trends such as DEI, which is pervasive shorthand across the corporate and academic worlds for a litany of identity-based grievances and causes, and ESG, essentially a scoring system that incentivizes investment not on the basis of companies’ performance for customers and shareholders but rather on their fealty to so-called “social justice” principles such as diversity and environmentalism.
Consumer boycotts against these trends have contributed to losses for companies like Disney and Anheuser-Busch while policymakers adopt new measures to curb corporations’ incentives to “go woke.”
Nineteen states – Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming – have formed a coalition to collectively agree to resist ESG standards in a variety of ways, such as banning their use in state pension-fund investment decisions, banning the use of “social credit scores” in banking and lending practices, and banning ideological discrimination against customers by financial institutions.