Gregg Steinhafel resigned earlier this week as CEO at Target corporation.
Many observers – many! – thought that was only a matter of time before the Minnesota-based retail giant melted down because their grocery sections carried, and continue to carry, no tabouli mix.
You can scour the grocery section of any Target store, anywhere in the country, and find not a single box of tabouli mix. On Steinhafel’s watch, the chain not only gave away the entire bulgur/vegetable salad market, but told the nation’s millions of tabouli lovers that Target hated them and watned them to die.
Many observers – many, many, many of them – believe this was the turning point in Steinhafel’s doomed regime.
Gregg Steinhafel – the executive who came up one box of tabouli short at the end of the day.
Does it seem like I might be adding a lot more importance to boxed tabouli than the rest of the market does?
And, perhaps, tacking a “many” behind the premise, to make it sound like my opinion is really some sort of groundswell?
Abe Sauer, writing for the Joyce Foundation-supported MinnPost, writes (and I’ll add emphasis):
That same year, Steinhafel and Target blundered into a PR disaster that, in many communities, still sees the brand’s name synonymous with homophobia.
The “PR Disaster” was actually a tornado of PR hype, ginned up in toto by the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, working in conjunction with Big Gay (the Human Rights committee), repeated at full volume by a media that was no less bald-faced in working for a Dayton victory than the DFL was. It’s a Big Lie repeated until the ill-informed figured it must be true, done entirely to stifle dissent from the DFL party line among Minnesota’s big businesses – especially those that the DFL and its cronies wanted to serve as examples, the ones that were “gay friendly” from the beginning. The message to those businesses; “Merely accepting us as employees and isn’t enough. You have to behind everything “we”, the political movement that owns Big Gay, stand for politically, too”.
The public reaction to Target’s 2010 campaign giving to conservative anti-gay candidates supported by the MN Forward fund are not the reason Steinhafel stepped down today. But they certainly should have a been a dire warning that the CEO and his top management circle was in danger of driving the entirety of the Target brand into the ditch in pursuit of a few minor tax cuts. Target (and Steinhafel’s family personally) supported candidates for no other discernible reason than that they claimed to be “pro-business.”
Making political donations to seek a political result most advantageous to the business?
One wonders what criteria Abe Sauer (and the people who pay for his writing) think a CEO’s goal should be – especially when faced with a DFL governor (and, now, legislature) who are turning out to be disastrous for business (although less so for businesses in Target’s weight class)?
What did happen to Target’s business fortunes after the 2010 campaign, anyway? How can we accurately track what the ultimate “many” – the market – thought about Target?
Via its stock value. Blue is Target, red is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The chart below goes back to the beginning of 2010. Target’s stock seems to have risen steadily from mid-summer (about the time the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota started its smear campaign), and only fell off after the first of the year, long after the election.
And then it came roaring back, up nearly 50% in two years, before the data breach took the stock back down to size – and even with the breach, Target stock is up over when Steinhafel took over (although not nearly as much as an investor would like).
So did the MNForward flap cause the stock fluctuations?
Or was it perhaps the lack of tabouli mix?
My money says it’s pretty much about the breach.
But there’s politicizing to be done!
Question: liberals with deep pockets paid big bucks to launch the Minnesota Monitor (later the Minnesota “Independent”) in 2006, laid most of the staff off after the 2008 election (to the shock of the staff), and shuttered the whole mess after 2010.
One wonders…
…no, many wonder if the same thing is going on with the MinnPost today.
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