Target suffers 10th consecutive week of foot traffic decline since caving on DEI | Hacker News Reader

Target suffers 10th consecutive week of foot traffic decline since caving on DEI

retailbrew.com

39 pointsjosefresco39 comments

I feel like this is just correlation at best. How are other similar retail stores like WalMart doing? Or what about regionally? Is the drop bigger in more left-leaning areas? Is it actually up in right-leaning areas?

Is this just economic jitters or are they really getting punished for dropping DEI?

While all the major retailers are down (due to economic "uncertainty"), Target is certainly hurting the most.

Costco, who pushed back against the calls to end DEI is doing the best.

> Target lost 9% of its foot traffic year over year in February and 6.5% in March, according to Placer.ai research. It even lost traffic during Target Circle Week. That’s more than Walmart, which lost 5.7% of traffic February and another 3.8% in March. In contrast, Costco gained 2.2% in traffic in February and 7.5% in March.

https://www.startribune.com/target-walmart-foot-traffic-decl...

The comparison with Costco is right there at the top of the article.

As the article mentions a couple times, costco is doing great. Sales increasing every week for months, stock at an all time high.

Is that because of DEI, or because Costco offers better deals and people are stocking up because of economic uncertainty? I know people who ahve stopped shopping at Target including me, but anecdotes don't prove anything.

Target also lost more than Walmart and basically all other retailers. There's a general downturn but Target's is steeper than others so it's likely the boycott is having an additive effect.

Costco is a membership store with a very different much higher income clientele who is less sensitive to economic jitters.

Am I tripping, did your comment not specifically wonder about costco a few minutes ago? Did you edit it?

I mentioned Costco when I first wrote it and then edited it about 20 seconds later, so no, you aren't tripping. :)

Kinda weird then to act like I was bringing up costco out of nowhere and to dismiss it as too different to compare but ok I guess.

Sorry, I didn't realize you replied when I still mentioned Costco. I specifically took it out when I realized it wasn't a fair comparison (and since it was already in the article).

This seems a case of extracting a lot of information from very little data.

The economy is in a weird situation. The situation is extremely fluid. And people who can afford to buy groceries, partially with a subscription service, are also the kind of people who are less likely to be affected by the economy.

There you have it. There is an alternative explanation that fits the same data. In fact I'll argue it fits a little bit better since the other chain's foot traffic was up only 0.3 percent. If people had fled from Target, you'd expect this one to go up quite a bit more.

It's like 10-13 weeks of data that directly corresponds with a new US administration, how long should we wait?

Exactly. It's a new administration who has done some, shall we say, questionable things to the economy. That is going to have an impact on people. Which means they're going to spend less money in stores, especially those who have a more uncertain income.

What is more likely? That people care about some rather obscure policies or that they care if they are able to keep their job?

You can compare it to other companies in the sector that didn't so publicly come out trashing their DEI programs to know if that's an additional factor and when you do you see Target has fallen farther than the rest in most metrics.

Target has 30 million customers per WEEK so this is truly mathematically significant and believable.

On the "very-online right," there's a lot of "go woke, go broke," but there is generally not a lot of precision when it comes to actually measuring whether this is true. Certainly this has been true in some cases, but often overtly "woke" things are quite successful and popular.

The Bud Light controversy was interesting since the market for Bud Light seemed to be fairly cornered by the very people who were likely to dislike modern progressive and "woke" signaling. (ie, lower class and lower-to-middle class working class)

To the extent that the analysis from the article is correct, I wonder whether Target's market significantly skewed liberal and progressive, and potentially they have offended their constituency.

As I noted above, I am a bit skeptical that the causation is so solid as people make out. In the past few years on the right, the analysis has often been very sloppy an ideological, even if some companies have seen legitimate pushback for political signaling.

>On the "very-online right," there's a lot of "go woke, go broke," but there is generally not a lot of precision when it comes to actually measuring whether this is true.

In other news: Despite many chants to the contrary, the Cincinnati Zoo reported only two visitors trespassed for male full frontal nudity on the most recent anniversary of Harambe's death.

No mention of the obvious walmart comparison.

Because if you look at the 5 yr chart, you'd see that Target wasn't doing so hot to begin with, and the recent decline is just a continuation of a long term trend rather than a reversal caused by "DEI" or whatever.

Wal-Mart is down too, but Target is down more. All of this information is easily accessible of course: https://www.ft.com/content/20d0678a-41b2-468d-ac10-14ce1eae3...

Walmart is an interesting case. I have no data to back this up but I feel Walmarts are typically the only big box store in their area while I have never seen a Target that didn't have another viable alternative within a few miles.

Does your average consumer actually care?

I've never met a single person that had a mindset of "I need to pick up some stuff at Target... oh wait I just remembered they cancelled their internal DEI program, I'd better do some research and shop at a retailer that still has a DEI program instead"

I guess I'm just not sure how the causality was determined. How do I know foot traffic isn't decreasing because of Target's prices compared to Costco's prices?

Target had been pandering to the LGBTQ community for a long time, they released many shirts and ads that tried to present itself as inclusive and forward thinking.

But the very second things change on the top, they flip.

Yes quite a few people are upset at this. They concretely damaged their brand, ruined trust, and pissed off a bunch of their target market. There is an intentional boycott now and it is clearly affecting their stock

My opinion on this is that as a generic business it's better to just stay out of politics and not pander to specific groups. You may score some short-term wins but if you fail any purity test from that point onwards, or pull back at all, that group will feel jilted and retaliate. Then, you're worse off than if you had just remained neutral.

This post counts as another one of the 1.56 billion.

It wasn't because Costco embraced DEI as much as Target actively dropping it as quickly as possible after Inauguration Day. They didn't even wait for a challenge. To me that means they were happy to drop it as quickly as they could. Which means it was all for show in the first place.

I've also seen a few half-assed attempts to go viral and bring customers back, which only makes me want to spend more elsewhere.

Yes my family has stopped shopping at Target unless everyone else is out of stock of something we know they carry. I’ve been there once since they did this while previously we would go once a week or so.

I think the point of the person you are replying to is that you are in a very, very small minority. So small that a decline in foot traffic at Target is likely only correlated with a decline in foot traffic, and nowhere near a cause of it.

It's not that small a minority within the market segment target has been successfully focusing on for two decades.

Agreed. When Target pushed Starbucks-in-Target, it was pretty obvious how they were positioning.

And granted, their furniture design is pretty nice, compared to what their competitor big-boxes stock.

Enough drops of water eventually make a puddle. Target was already second fiddle to Walmart so alienating a consumer base they spent years deliberately tailoring marketing for is not a good idea if the boat is already leaky.

I have stopped shopping there as well, but continue to shop at Amazon. Amazon is clear that they are a corporation who only cares about the bottom line. I can respect that vs Target who is pandering.

On a similar note, my family eschews Hobby Lobby for similar ideological reasons.

Ah. This post counts for one, or 0.000173% of the 1.56 billion customers (annual).

- Demographics https://www.numerator.com/snapshots/target/

- More demographics https://www.contimod.com/target-statistics/

What might be interesting is to sample your persons more broadly (across country) and in more quantity?

> Does your average consumer actually care?

Yes. This is an anecdote but I personally know people who are boycotting Target and a lot of other companies that backtracked on DEI and LGBTQ rights. I think these companies are all posturing and will say what they think will get you in the door but other people I know are taking this personally and changing their spending habits to reflect that.

If the average target consumer didn't care, Target wouldn't have had 10 weeks of consecutive foot traffic declines. Most things sold in Target can be bought elsewhere, so people have voted with their wallets.

Executives at Target made the calculation that their sales wouldn't decline much (if at all) by publicly canceling their DEI programs.

To the question about Target and Costco's prices: Typically these retailers will have price matching policies in place to keep foot traffic.

Quick google search implies (not sure how accurate this is), that approximately 12% of Target's demographic is black [0]. Seeing close to a 10% drop in foot traffic for a low margin business like Target when a competitor is seeing almost the near opposite gains is a signal someone really screwed up.

[0] https://expertbeacon.com/targets-target-market/

Especially because it wasn’t like target came out to say “we hate DEI now”, they just realized that any corporation that had a DEI program was going to open themselves up to legal issues so they just can’t say things out loud anymore.

Yes and practically it's a slippery slope .. marginalizing the weak, via government powers.

May not be needed to say: in an authoritarian society, compliance paradoxically breeds more authoritarianism.

(From AI, and I agree with) The idea of the impact of compliance in authoritarian societies is .., Active Compliance > Passive Compliance > and finally, Pre-Compliance.

- Bonus: discussion of the assertion that those in upperclass authoritarian societies DO comply with, and aren't affected by authoritarian policies ( Note this is for INDIVIDUALS not corporations, I speculate it works the same however ) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/paradox-voluntary-compliance-...

So, watch as Us here on Hacker News start to encourage Active compliance, move to Passive, and then encourage Pre-Compliance!

Then, BINGO! "You're an authoritarian enabler!"

Yeah, it has been a reckoning. I’ve never seen liberal boomers and gen x-ers get so organized. I’ve only known the opposite in my lifetime. It’s been great to see and I’m here for it. Keep this up and you’ll turn the hosts of The View into leaders of an armed militia.

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