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.
Just to build on this. No publicly traded company is an ally to any group but its shareholders.
That’s why it’s our responsibility as consumers to align their shareholder interests to doing the right fucking thing. Boycotts and other consumer action are part of their calculations on what the shareholder interests are, so a large population of informed consumers who vote their conscience with their wallet will provide pressure to do the right thing.
Target is under more pressure than companies like Walmart, John Deere or Tractor Supply, because Target went further in its DEI efforts, and it has a more progressive base of customers than those competitors.
This is wild move for a company on its arse anyway.
Can we add bigger offenders like Wal-Mart and Amazon?
Join me, I’ve been boycotting them for years.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah co-ops are amazing, I’m always astounded when I find cities that don’t have any
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.
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.
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!
There is supposed to be a weeklong boycott of Amazon this month, I forget the exact date.
March 7-14
I’ve been boycotting Target for months now
When they took down all their pride stuff to appease the far right, I never looked back.
Ending DEI was it for me
My wife told me we are boycotting, so lets do this!
I have 3 trans friends and as a super straight middle aged privileged all to hell white dad, fuck these corporate assholes.
My wife lives at Target. She’s already found other places to get the essentials.
40 days.
Fill a target online shopping cart with every day items, stuff you would buy every week or every month, and abandon it. Nothing big or expensive, standard shit.
Do that a few times.
There’s a boycott? I just don’t shop there because it’s the same crap as everywhere else for more money and a worse experience.
I know right I can just buy it on Amazon /s
I used to pretty regularly shop at target. When they rolled back DEI proactively for trump, I stopped.
Target near me made their employees stay inside/keep working while it was evacuated for a bomb threat during that period of stochastic terrorism.
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.
Damn and here I am participating in this boycott for so long without even trying.
Target sucks.
Why do we hate Target again? No really I’m out of the loop and I’m not reading an article written by a company owned by the Far Right
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.
Every Target I go to is nicer than Walmart and has a more curated feel of products. I agree on the last part but it’s because Target was advertising itself as being more in touch with things such as DEI and then backtracked, where Walmart and Amazon never positioned themselves as much.
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.
Yeah, Kmart vibes is accurate.
There was a time when Target had a middle class demo they…targeted. But that demo is too small now. They’re either going to need to shrink and market to the top 10%, competing with Whole Foods, or lower their standards and compete with Amazon. Oof, gotta love monopolies. Starting to think this boycott was Bezos’ idea.
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.
We only have power when a large enough group of us does something. Anything else is publicity.
I agree with Botanicals. Whether you truly have an impact or not…I guess we’re arguing semantics…but simply vote with your wallet. 🙂 There is little excuse when options abound! If someone engages in behavior you really don’t like, boycott their ass. Don’t buy their product or service. If they didn’t make money, they’d quit their shit or go bankrupt. “No raindrop is responsible for the flood.”
Look at the Bud Light boycott. Granted, enough of the people doing the boycott were uninformed consumers that bought something else owned by ABInBev, and still gave the same company their money. But others went all the way. The campaign itself was still effective, as Bud Light sales TANKED. Product went BAD. The company lost LOTS OF MONEY. They lost prominent shelf space that they will probably never get back, but who knows, never is a big word.
You have power, little raindrop. You do.
I quit eating meat because I care about animals, I limit my driving to as little as possible to lessen my impact, I use open source software exclusively, I only buy repairable tech… I’m doing what I can to lessen the suffering I, an individual, inflicts and it’s made no difference. Animals still being killed, Earth still dying, corpos still raking in record profits, people still losing their homes, jobs, lives… I understand the need to feel like you and your choices matter. That’s how people cope with all this. I’m m not like that. I see things as they are and not as I hope they might be one day if we can just not shop at Target.
Already been boycotting target
Every one of these idiot companies pivoting to cowboy capitalism from rainbow capitalism are clueless about who actually has money in this country.
Been boycotting them since my local one let ICE use their back parking lot to stage up and detain folks
Been part of a boycott for decades and didn’t even know
I felt the same way about Budweiser
Wish I was a tiefling IRL 😔
What’s a tiefling?
A species of humanoid from DND that vaguely resemble devils. Think horns, tails, and red or blue skin.
Ahhh! Thanks.
Tief is German for deep, and -ling is used similarly to English, meaning a creature, often in a diminutive sense but not always. I didn’t know what a tiefling was but maybe this extra info helps.
It’s a dnd person from what I’ve been told.
I was boycotting them from the point where I quit the job in logistics. That job was awful.
