WSJ What’s News
Boycotting Target, Part 1: How It Doubled Down on DEI, Then Backed Off
Sun, 18 May 2025
Many U.S. shoppers know Target as a place to get everyday items like groceries and paper towels, as well as clothes and homegoods. But recently some shoppers have stopped buying things at Target as part of boycotts over its pullback from policies around diversity, equity and inclusion. In the first episode of this special What’s News series, host Alex Ossola digs into how Target got here: the company’s history and why shoppers are upset with Target in particular at a moment when many other companies are also changing their DEI policies. In your feed, you can find the second episode of this series, looking into the boycotts’ impact on Target’s business and on those of Black entrepreneurs with products on Target’s shelves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What led to Target's recent boycott?
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It's Sunday, May 18th. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is a special episode of What's New Sunday. On a recent Sunday afternoon, I, along with producer Jess Jupiter, visited a Target store in Brooklyn.
So we're here in Atlantic Terminal, standing in front of the Target. There are a lot of people coming in and out. It's Sunday, it's nice out, New Yorkers are happy, and the store is kind of hopping.
I say it's booming.
Yeah. All right. All right. Let's go check it out. Let's go.
We took a walk around the store to get a sense of what was going on. People were waiting to try on clothes and grabbing seasonal items for Easter. Near the registers, we did my favorite thing, looking into people's carts to check out their haul. Organization, cleaning.
Snacks. Snacks, yeah. Not so many clothes, actually.
We talked to a few customers outside the store.
What do you buy? Everything. Uh-huh, go on. Like, literally everything.
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Chapter 2: How did Target's DEI policies evolve?
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.
And so while many other companies have retreated from their DEI commitments in recent months, Target's customers say this DEI rollback felt personal.
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.
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.
Customers from different races all over the country say they felt this deeply.
This was a company that actually aligned with my moral values. So when I heard that, it's almost like it was a gut punch.
Yeah.
That's what I felt. I felt some switching up.
You can't lie to our population and expect us to come spend our money with you. You know, it's not fair. We're not doing it. It's time to stand and it's time for everybody to stand for it.
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Chapter 3: What is the customer response to Target's changes?
And then Target made an announcement that they were going to pull back on that collection.
Pulling back meant removing some items from stores and moving merchandise from the front to the back. Target leadership said that they made those decisions out of concerns for the safety of its staff.
And then that had its own backlash from people that felt that that was a betrayal of their support of the LGBTQ community.
Target was under pressure. In its effort to appease conservative shoppers offended by the collection, it created distrust among LGBT customers. Here's marketing professor Americus Reid again.
It points to the importance of you spend so much time and effort trying to create that brand and how it can so easily be undermined if you make some mistakes. It's sort of like this idea that, you know, trust is formed in droplets, but can be lost in bucketfuls.
John Zelitis, an analyst and president and founder of investment advisory firm Quo Vadis Capital, follows the discount retail space. He says that investors felt the impact in the short term.
Investors are going to be a bit agnostic about the values and the messaging, but they're going to be quite reactive to actual changes in fundamental performance on the business. And that happened. There were four quarters that were negatively impacted by the reaction to the Pride collection.
But Michael Baker, managing director and head of consumer research at investment firm D.A. Davidson, says that in the long term, the episode around the Pride merchandise didn't change much for investors.
They, like a lot of retailers, we think are in a little bit of a tricky situation where they're trying to appease and please many different constituents. But they did make a pivot. And so we think they sort of adapted well to that issue. And so that in and of itself, their focus on DEI or other kinds of initiatives didn't really change our view of the company for the longer term.
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