Sarah Randazzo
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
Boycott Over Diversity Dents Target’s Sales
We will continue to be anchored in the belief that creating an environment where people feel included, supported and respected makes us a stronger company. It helps us build and support our talented team, serve millions of guests in all 50 states and be a valued partner in the communities we serve.
WSJ What’s News
Tariffs Are About to Separate Retail’s Winners and Losers
The volatility of the tariffs creates a lot of uncertainty and it's changing day by day.
WSJ What’s News
Tariffs Are About to Separate Retail’s Winners and Losers
In order to meet the customer needs, we have to have product on the floor. And so we were not one of the retailers that chose to leave product in the ports or at the factories. We brought it in. We have full stores.
WSJ What’s News
Tariffs Are About to Separate Retail’s Winners and Losers
We've sold almost 200,000 pairs of the baggy jean on TikTok shop over the last 12 months, which is pretty significant. And we've made an effort to bring in the product that we need to continue to drive those sales.
WSJ What’s News
Tariffs Are About to Separate Retail’s Winners and Losers
Taking PacSun on a global scale has been something that we've been wanting to do for many years and it does feel like an exciting moment to do so and so we're also exploring other international territories.
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
Soon after the Trump administration came into being, an announcement came out from the Justice Department about this new federal task force. Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. And it was interesting because it has people from all across the government.
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
There's Health and Human Services, there's the Education Department, there's the Justice Department, and there's even the General Services Administration, which handles procurement for the government. So it's kind of this real multi-agency range of folks who are meeting and
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
What we've then learned is that they're really taking a hard line against colleges and universities over what they say was inaction around protests last year over the Hamas-Israel war.
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
Yeah, so functionally, what it's doing is really putting universities on notice. And they've been threatening funding against a bunch of big-name elite schools. And it did start out seemingly focused more on antisemitism. But some of the more recent battles, including what we're seeing with Harvard right now, are going beyond that into broader governance of college campuses and things that
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
many would say are going well beyond just combating anti-Semitism. And so it's really been a push and pull between, hey, we control federal funding to you, universities, so do what we say or we're going to pull this funding. And some universities saying, okay, we'll make some changes so that we get the funding back and others saying, you know, you can't tell us what to do.
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
Schools are responding differently to the task force's individual demands. Columbia somewhat acquiesced to some things, whereas Harvard is kind of taking more of a stand. And I think other schools are trying to honestly just stay out of the crosshairs. There was a list of 10 universities that the task force put out. that it was going to have initial school on-campus visits for.
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
I've talked to several schools on that list who say they haven't had any robust conversations yet and they haven't seen them on campus. So the 10 universities on that list, I think, are more on notice, but then others are just watching it all and just trying to see where it all lands and what it might mean for them.
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
We haven't seen any actual lawsuits yet filed by a university against the administration. We feel like that probably could be coming at some point. We have seen some faculty lawsuits from Columbia and Harvard.
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
And for the ones that are on the list but haven't been fully in the crosshairs yet, we haven't seen any litigation, but I am sure they are all hands on deck preparing, maybe making some preemptive changes in terms of putting in better processes around student discipline or how things are dealt with if complaints come in about anti-Semitism and that kind of thing.
WSJ What’s News
The Task Force Taking On American Universities
So no one is just sitting on their hands waiting around, but it's a little hard to see all of what's going on.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
And then Target made an announcement that they were going to pull back on that collection.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
And then that had its own backlash from people that felt that that was a betrayal of their support of the LGBTQ community.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
And it went beyond that, right? There was also a reversal of their engagement with the Human Rights Commission, which is an LGBTQ organization. And that mirrors things that have happened at many large companies over the last year or so.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
Like a lot of large companies, Target talked about diversity as something that They hope to focus on more. They wanted more diversity. And it wasn't just about, like, doing good. It was a business imperative. This idea that if you have more diverse viewpoints on your team, you're going to come up with better ideas. It's going to be more equitable in terms of who gets jobs at the company.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
Retailers are a consumer-facing business, right? You're going to be able to attract a more diverse customer base because you'll have people coming up with ideas that reflect your customer base. That sort of is, in general, how they and lots of other companies have talked about it over the years.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
One reason that consumers seem to be more bothered by the fact that Target did a thing that other retailers have also done is that, one, Target has been more, quote unquote, progressive in a lot of its operations. Like its brand, its marketing, how it talks about progressive issues, even its own employee base, right? Target is based in the Twin Cities in Minnesota.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
It's a more progressive community that tends to vote blue versus Walmart, one of its big competitors, which is in Northwest Arkansas, which tends to vote red. So even its own employees sort of felt probably, and some of its customers, like it was a more jarring change coming from Target than, say, a Walmart.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
Target was really... A company in the spotlight after George Floyd's murder in 2020 because that event happened in their hometown where they're headquartered. And, you know, one of their oldest stores on Lake Street in South Minneapolis, you know, was damaged in the riots afterwards. And they rebuilt that store and did a lot of press around it.
WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
There was a incident where they put out their annual sort of pride merchandise collection that June. And there was backlash from conservative activists and shoppers about that collection.
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
There's a few factors. One is just the squeeze that middle-income families, those making above six figures, face. They don't qualify for the typical financial aid that those who have very low salaries can pretty much go to many colleges for free, but they don't make enough to comfortably be able to pay $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year to send their children to a private school.
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
And so a lot of schools like Harvard have been
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
increasing the aid for this group of families over time and then secondly we are in this climate right now of political strife around a lot of elite universities and so I don't know if the timing is just a coincidence but there is public pressure on Harvard and others around some of the Israel Hamas war protests and so this is a bit of good publicity for them in that climate as well.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
The totality of these cuts is going to mean that there's more than just the research that has to be hit because a lot of the infrastructure for this research still exists and needs to be funded.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
When these funding cuts first started to come around back in March, a lot of schools did really basic things like saying hiring freezes or just look at your spending, be a little more careful, surface level things. As the months have gone on for schools, particularly like Columbia and Harvard that have had
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
really large sums of money pulled, they're now having to do, you know, some pretty substantial cutbacks. And so in Harvard School of Public Health, for instance, which is almost half funded with federal research dollars, they've had to do layoffs.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
They're doing austerity measures that include no coffee in the lounge anymore, no more ordering food for lunch, cutting back printers and physical desktop phones, even little things like that. And then We have other places that are doing some layoffs or pausing research or saying that cuts could be coming. So it's a real gradient depending on how much each university relies on that money.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
That's what a lot of schools are analyzing right now. But the totality of these cuts is going to mean that there's more than just the research that has to be hit because a lot of the infrastructure for this research still exists and needs to be funded. Buildings, some staffing, just things that they won't be able to cut related to the research.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
And so that means that they'll have to look elsewhere to make all the numbers work.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
The dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, her name's Hopi Hoekstra, she had a meeting with faculty earlier this month and she said, quote, these federal actions have set in motion changes that will not be undone, at least not in the foreseeable future.
WSJ What’s News
Consumer Sentiment in U.S. Falls for Fifth Straight Month
And so Harvard is suing the Trump administration trying to restore some of the federal funding cuts, but the dean acknowledged that even if they win that lawsuit, she thinks these cuts are still going to be impactful and that really we've turned a corner that we're never going to turn back from.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
Universities are really facing headwinds on a few different fronts here. And so one of them is around a lot of the Trump administration's directives around DEI and getting rid of DEI programs. Schools are also reacting to changes in federal funding to research the National Institutes for Health.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
There's a big formula change potentially coming that would cost universities potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. And then there's also a task force project into antisemitism at the federal level that schools are responding to. And so there's really a lot of different fronts at this point that they're responding to. So what are universities doing?
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
A lot of schools are preemptively doing hiring freezes, for instance. We've seen dozens of universities across the country from elite ones on down. saying that they're having temporary hiring freezes because they need to figure out whether that money for research grants is coming or not.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
And as part of that, PhD students are also having some offers withdrawn because they just don't know if they can support those PhD students for the next five years. So those ones are a little in the preemptive bucket around the DEI. You know, there was a letter that the education department put out that didn't have the force of law, but gave a kind of deadline of the end of February deadline.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
to get rid of a lot of dei related things and so some schools were worried about that and didn't want to get in the crosshairs so again it didn't totally have legal bearing but it was kind of a big scary letter that went out from the education department and then obviously there are some schools facing immediate backlash like columbia
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
It permeates across campuses. The research grants themselves are mostly focused on the sciences, but it's interesting because schools are saying that even if there's cuts... To the science research grants, that's going to have trickle effects because they'll have to maybe move money from elsewhere to accommodate.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
And culture-wise, if you do things like some of the schools we found that canceled a Black student alumni event or are no longer going to have graduation ceremonies for different ethnic or affinity groups, it's going to be smaller changes that impact the overall culture of a place and then also some larger changes when it comes to, say, employment or opportunities for graduate programs that are more tangible.