It’s not a good week to be a Target shareholder.
Target’s stock price has taken a hit amid the backlash over its LGBT-themed products.
The New York Post noted on May 17 the retailer’s stock closed at $160.96 per share, giving it a market value of $74.3 billion.
But as of Thursday morning, its stock price was hovering around $140 a share. And its market value was down roughly $10 billion and around $64 billion.
Target is…
…I was about to say “pushing back”.
But it’s more “trying to deflect”: This piece is called “Target is being held hostage by annti-LGBTQ campaign”.
No word if any “pouncing” was also involved.
But here’s the part were I have a question. Target accepts a certain amount of “breakage”; shoplifting, vandalism, even people opening containers to see what’s i before they buy unopened ones. They accept it as part of the cost of doing business – even more so today, when their urban stores are plagued with rampant theft and vandalism.
So about this bit here:
The campaign became hostile, with threats levied against Target employees and instances of damaged products and displays in stores…In the end, Target opted to protect employee safety by removing certain items that it said caused the most “volatile” reaction from opponents.
DIsplays get damaged all the time. And Target employees are no strangers to angry, hostile customers. None of which is OK.
But Target is claiming there’ve been attacks, even violence, against Target workers.
So where are the reports of the actual acts of violence?
No video? Nothing in writing anywhere?
Call me a cynic, but it almost appears that Target is trying to deflect blame for its market bleeding away from tuck-under swimsuits for teenage boys and Satanic designers, and over to the Phantom MAGA Menace.
Someone show me if I’m wrong, here.
UPDATE 7:03 AM
Oh.
Given that the demand for “right wing violence” exceeds the supply by an order of magnitude or two, it was always a safe bet. But hate assuming
Were the threats of violence over the rainbow goods reported to the police?
How many threats of violence from customers are normally reported by target every day? And break it down by store location.
Corporate communications is story telling. It is narrative-building to achieve the corporation’s goals.
You can break the narrative by asking questions they do not want to answer.
I worked for Target for 11 years. They pay a lot of attention to ESG. A publicly held company’s duty should be to its shareholders, but ESG is about “stakeholders.” It’s a grift, but the folks in the C suites accept and welcome it, especially the folks at 10th and Nicollet.
As I have had some interaction with Target as a volunteer in the local neighborhood organization, I have learned- Target rarely, if ever, reports anything to police. Much like college campuses, they have their internal security department to deal with things. This keeps the public perception that they are safe places, since their are few public records of crime there.
^ Interesting. How utterly cynical.
I’m wondering if any of the alleged “threats against employees” aren’t exactly the same as AOC’s claims that people are “threatening her with almost murder?”
mjb003;
I believe that they report more than you think. I’ve seen police cars outside of several stores, especially in Bloomington and Edina on more than one occasion. The store that the the black mobs of Minneapolis always try to do their five finger discount shopping at, have at least 4 MPD and at least 2 private security officers on premises during business hours.
Corporations were formed so that individual investors did not bear the total risk of loss if an investment went bad. Think about the Merchant Of Venice, Shylock wanting his pound of flesh from the sole investor, whose ship was late.
Insulating investors from personal liability, while Imposing a duty on the board of directors to maximize shareholder profits, made corporations a useful economic tool which exponentially increased the wealth of Western civilization.
Liberals believe corporations should consider more than shareholder profits, they should also consider the environmental, societal and governance Impact of their businesses, even if profits are reduced. Corporations should have a duty to consider ESG and shareholders should suck up their losses, being happy to pay for a better Minnesota.
Normally, shareholders who got cheated out of profits would fire the directors and hire smarter ones. Except liberals have infiltrated financial institutions so lenders now impose ESG requirements on corporate borrowing. That’s stupid of course because a lender with ESG has weaker profits and less ability to repay, but What are a few corporate bankruptcies compared to saving the world?
Target was in the forefront of sowing the wind and now it is reaping the whirlwind. Cue the world’s smallest violin.
Somebody is reading the Daily Mail and actually believing and then acting on the right wing fever dreams in its pages…Target succumbed to a small minority of crackpots.
All of whom are liberals
Emery,
Appeal to authority noted, dismissed.
What facts are they wrong about?
#DogGoneProblems
ESG conflicts with Democratic Socialyzm but no Liberal will admit (or perhaps is not smart enough to understand) the intellectual conundrum.
On the one hand, we should spread the costs of a better society over all of society since all of society benefits. On the other hand, we should force businesses to bear the cost since they’re the ones who make the profit.
This is not the only area in which liberal Philosophy is intellectually bankrupt. Their arguments generally devolve to the level of a little kid who’s told you can’t have a pony.
It’s too big for the house, it eats too much, you won’t take care of it, All valid reasons to say no, and completely irrelevant.
“But I want one.”
There’s a troll over at the professors who does the same thing, ALL the time. No matter what source a center-right person cites, he does the same mockery: you’re citing who? Weak sauce.
PS: Mitch, please, asking for facts from the troll. You are a glass half full kinda guy, very optimistic. He’ll just drop another threadjack.
Btw, Somebody is reading the Daily Mail because it provides better coverage of MN news than the local media.
Target has stealth edited their bs about violence. So like all lefties, just scream that you are receiving death threats, no proof necessary.
The death threat is a form of canceling. They up the ante so no one can criticize them because that means you are in favor of murdering people.
It’s silencing the opposition with a lie. So basically, standard liberal tactics.
America’s newspaper: “Innocent multi-billion dollar corporation ruthlessly attacked by people not giving them money”…
Hey, at least they learned from AB…had they pulled the crap without a plausible explanation (and hey why not choose right wingers because everyone hates them, right?) the would have faced equal criticism from the LBGWTF-ever crowd.
Pretty crafty, actually. Except…..our side has money, too, and we don’t protest by screaming about it on any media stream that’ll listen…..we vote with our $$$. Quietly.
Target is getting gutted. They had to do something, but they also didn’t want to upset their grooming customers, or their DEI rating. So they trotted out White supremacist terrorists.