Had no idea a boycott was happening.
Dear capitalist media… Target is being boycotted for being racist. And no, Target is not the victim.
These headlines ffs…
Remember there are bots even on Lemmy to push the narrative that we have no power. Billionaires aren’t scared of a couple less dollars, but they are TERRIFIED of us figuring out we can organize. Let’s not fight each other let’s fight the oligarchy!
I used to do nearly all my shopping there because of the policies they got rid of. Cancelled my 360 membership, getting used to buying flour 25# at a time from Costco …
I wish I was working for target so I can take a nap at work.
My wife told me we are boycotting, so lets do this!
I have 3 trans friends and as a super straight middle aged privileged all to hell white dad, fuck these corporate assholes.
My wife lives at Target. She’s already found other places to get the essentials.
40 days.
Fill a target online shopping cart with every day items, stuff you would buy every week or every month, and abandon it. Nothing big or expensive, standard shit.
Do that a few times.
Are you Frank Whely and is your wife Jennifer Connelly?
I work at the Target warehouse that supplies the northwest, should be interesting to see if this actually noticeably changes our daily product volume. Gonna hazard a guess at no probably not. I should have some idea within 24 hours thanks to just in time logistics but seasonal product could fuzz the numbers a bit.
Works for me though, I’m mostly here for the tuition benefit and I don’t lose benefits eligibility unless I dip below 20/hr/week average which I can’t imagine happening.
Putting a time limit on a boycott undermines the boycott.
Saw this with the Loblaw’s boycott here in Canada, it was very ineffective because they can just wait it out.
Does Loblaw run a law blog by any chance?
Yes, just don’t shop at Target.
It’s strange that people forget that businesses like Target getting rid of DEI also gets rid of many disability act initiatives. There should be more outrage than just a boycott.But why would people boycott a law blog?
From the point of view of the boycotter, having a time limit helps mentally.
I think more people are ready to think “just buy somewhere else for a bit”. If it becomes “forever” might seem daunting.
My two cents, not sure if this is the real reason.
That’s my thought as well. A one day boycott like the “no shopping day” does literally nothing, but 40 days can reform habits. To the extent practicable, I’m doing all my shopping at Costco now. I generally eat a lot of the same things, so bulk quantities aren’t that big of a deal to manage.
Instead if 40 days, let’s try 40 months.
Let’s make them the next kmart
I used to pretty regularly shop at target. When they rolled back DEI proactively for trump, I stopped.
Target near me made their employees stay inside/keep working while it was evacuated for a bomb threat during that period of stochastic terrorism.
I had heard about the boycott, but didn’t realize this was the reason. Target’s on the other side of town from me so I don’t shop there anyway, but yeah definitely not going there at all now. Fuck them.
It’s “funny” how capitalist media will talk about the boycott and cry agonized tears for Target…
But never mention the “why”, especially not in headlines.
Using gift cards is OK if you’re boycotting a place, right? I mean, Target already has the money and you’d just be helping them out if you didn’t buy anything with them.
I’m a school bus driver and I always get a lot of tips (Christmas and end of year) in the form of Target gift cards. BTW yes, I agree that tipping school bus drivers is fucking weird. We already get paid and it’s not like we’re going to drive the kids into a tree if we don’t get tipped.
In my old community the bus driver was part of our community, we knew her and she was amazing. She knew the kids, she welcomed them by name every morning and she made sure they got to school safe AND ok.
The last bit is the most important part. She deserved a “tip” but in reality as someone who was part of my extended “raise my kid family” she “earned” her card and Starbucks gift card (mostly cuz she drank 7-11 coffee and I liked razzing her)
Our current bus driver is a contractor who couldn’t give a fuck about anything except when he has to be at the stop and when he is allowed to leave, exactly where the “nah you’re too far away from the bus stop fuck you’d kid” line is.”
It’s not always weird, but can be.
Those are Christmas gifts. The parents are just showing appreciation for you already not driving their kids into a tree, not bribing you lol.
No, it’s definitely bribes lol
Not really. The explanation is somewhat complex.
Although target already has the money once a gift card has been purchased, they will not recognise the money as revenue until you use the card.
Suppose my lawn mowing guy charges $50 each time he mows my lawn, and he comes 12 times a year. In January I just transfer him $600 because I don’t want to muck around with smaller payments all the time.
When he calculates his “revenue” for January, should he include the whole $600? It would be more accurate to set aside the $550 he hadn’t really earned yet, and recognise that once he actually does the work.
There’s more geaky accounting stuff I could say, but in summary if you want to send a message to Target management, refrain from using gift cards during the boycott.
They don’t get to record it as revenue, but they do get to sit on the cash, earning interest etc on it. Companies loooove gift cards. It’s free money.
For a company health perspective, it’s better to use it so they’re at least put the cost-of-goods. Best option would be to sell the gift cards to someone who was going to shop there anyways.
I’ll allow it.
We already get paid and it’s not like we’re going to drive the kids into a tree if we don’t get tipped.
You might not do it, I however am always looking for revenue streams. If it’s for profit, it can’t be illegal.
Looks at the health insurance industry
boycotts dont work, guys. keep trying, though! maybe try something a bit more proactive?
just an idea, maybe you could try recording a video of minecraft gameplay where a 1:1 scale recreation of the white house is destroyed in a fire?
edit: please read my other comment replies before replying, thanks!
If you truly believed this, you’d not be here. You’d come here in 40 days to poke fun, but you’d not bother with us because you know that the effect will be zero. That you’re here tells me that you, or much more likely your masters because you don’t have an original thought in your mind, are afraid that this will actually get momentum and affect Target’s stock price and sales figures. Thanks for the vote of confidence! Let’s get boycotting!
here’s a question - if you had a friend who was making a mistake, would you try to encourage them to reconsider?
if you think I would poke fun at you, you have absolutely the wrong idea about my motivations. i don’t want you to fail, i want you to succeed. i just know that this boycott won’t achieve anything, and all of the time and energy put into it will be completely wasted.
i want people to take all of that time and energy and put it towards something that will actually achieve something meaningful. i want people to join a union and find a local activist group, and start actually making connections, building solidarity, and taking collective action that actually will accomplish something!
Slashing the profits of a $60bil company doesn’t do anything.
Lol, Lmao
yes, it does literally nothing. even if nobody shopped at target ever again it would change absolutely nothing. they’d go into administration, get bought by some other corporation, and possibly rebrand. wealthy people would likely profit from short selling the stock.
target isn’t the problem. the problem is the system. you can’t change the system by boycotting some random business. i am begging you to do literally any other form of activism. because this aint it.
luigi, now there’s a guy with bolder ideas.
Go do something about it then bitch
If impacting the bottom line if a corporation no longer has any effect then we should just resign ourselves to extinction
But then why is Canada’s whole absolute boycott of everything American gaining traction around the world? Could it be that… when we ALL participate, it actually starts to make them worry?
…nah, couldn’t be.
Honestly I used to think like you did, but this time I think if we apply this boycott as a broad stroke to capitalism in general and ONLY shop small or legitimately supportive companies, then it’ll STACK with the other actions people take. One thing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and while it may seem small on its own, it adds up.
firstly, thank you so much for the thoughtful message. reading insightful comments like yours, where it’s clear that you’re genuinely trying your best to make the world a better place, and you actually think about what i wrote, makes all of the hate i get totally worthwhile.
in my opinion, it’s more the unity of the working class, that’s what scares them - when we work together, and when we’re organized.
that’s the biggest flaw with petitions and boycotts, they are all focused on individual action. You don’t get together and organize a picket line, you don’t get to meet like-minded people, you don’t learn about how capitalism affects anyone other than yourself.
i’ve been involved in activism efforts for a long time now and if we could get just 5% of people who signed a petition to instead get involved with a local activist group, we would have won this fight by now.
Or maybe you could try having someone proofread your post ideas
do you genuinely think that i’m wrong? do you truly believe in your heart that a 40 day boycott of a single big box store will help people?
we’re literally watching the united states become a fascist dictatorship and you believe that this is an appropriate response?
people are suffering and dying because of us, and we’re congratulating ourselves for buying stuff on amazon instead of target for 40 days? seriously?
i don’t need a proofreader. i need people to wake up and actually do something, not waste everyone’s time and energy with performative bullshit that achieves nothing other than making us feel like we’re not doing nothing.
Are you saying that boycotts are necessarily performative, or just in certain cases?
i wouldn’t say they’re always performative, because there’s always nuance. but i would say that they’re probably #2 on my list of pointless bullshit that almost never actually achieves anything, right after petitions.
Why don’t you wake up and do something then if you feel so impassioned? Instead, I see you’re wasting your time complaining on an obscure reddit alternative.
i’m a union officer and rep, and i’m engaged with activism efforts in my area. sometimes i get bored at work and comment on lemmy.
it was easier for you to lash out at me than it was for you to actually seriously engage with what i wrote - that kind of reaction serves the ruling class, and sows division between the working class.
You’re a union rep discouraging boycott protests? Then you’re a bad union rep.
i’m encouraging people to find an alternative to this boycott, because it will not be effective, and it will take away energy and oxygen from other forms of activism which are much more effective. boycotts and petitions almost universally achieve nothing, and they discourage people from getting involved with real activism.
Every time I’ve gone into a target in the last 5 years, they legit looked like they were closing down. Idk why people are boycotting them in particular when Walmart and Amazon are way worse.
Every Target I go to is nicer than Walmart and has a more curated feel of products. I agree on the last part but it’s because Target was advertising itself as being more in touch with things such as DEI and then backtracked, where Walmart and Amazon never positioned themselves as much.
Target’s thing has always been to be “Walmart but fancy”. Fun fact, the last “T” is actually silent, and you’re supposed the pronounce it “Tar-jay”
you’re supposed the pronounce it “Tar-jay”
Lmao, no you’re not, that’s just something people started doing to literally make fun of the “Walmart but fancy” image they cultivated for themselves.
i can tell you why - because it’s easy. this is slacktivism. it changes nothing about policy. it exists exclusively to make people feel better about capitulating and doing nothing to prevent their country from becoming a fascist dictatorship
“Hey! That store you don’t shop at? Make sure you continue to not shop there for the next 40 days! That’ll show the elites!”
Same, I get major K-Mart in its final days vibes: lots of empty shelves, stuff in dented and torn packaging, hostile and surly employees etc. etc.
Browsing through the Target grocery section has always mystified me. Not great selection and everything costs about 50% more than the local grocery stores. I have never understood why anybody would shop there for groceries.
Yeah, Kmart vibes is accurate.
There was a time when Target had a middle class demo they…targeted. But that demo is too small now. They’re either going to need to shrink and market to the top 10%, competing with Whole Foods, or lower their standards and compete with Amazon. Oof, gotta love monopolies. Starting to think this boycott was Bezos’ idea.
The Rite Aid near us actually was 3/4 empty all through the pandemic. They put up a sign saying they were remodeling, but closed a few months ago.
Drug stores are so fucking weird. It’s a business model that apparently supports a store on every corner, yet they often go out of business too. And it’s always Rite Aids going out of business, although I couldn’t say what the difference is between those and the other chains.
Our Target is in pretty good shape, always busy. Wonder what the difference is…locale? Management?
you don’t have to go in my wife orders in the app and they text when it’s ready and bring it out to the car. usually the order is ready within a few minutes.
we are both autistic and do much of our shopping this way it’s soooo much easier I dunno why anyone would go in.
I go in the store to browse. But I’m also NT so it doesn’t stress me out to be in a store. My wife is ND and has to psych herself up for in-store things.
I mean besides the time that doesn’t seem much different from the other 2. Walmart I’ll place my grocery pickup order, select a time (usually right when I’m coming home from work so I know I won’t be doing anything else) and they’ll bring it out to me. Amazon obviously delivers right to my front door. Walmart means I need to order maybe 12 hours in advance and Amazon a couple days, but otherwise is there a difference?
It couldn’t come at a worse time for the company
Neither could their capitulation to Trumps bigoted rhetoric.
I got a lot of flak and eye rolls from my liberal friends a few years ago when I, as a queer woman, would criticize their Rainbow Capitalism. But Target is not an ally, they never were. They are simply a corporation that got some easy publicity in liberal spaces by showing the bare minimum decency.
Fair weather allies, aren’t.
Just to build on this. No publicly traded company is an ally to any group but its shareholders.
That’s why it’s our responsibility as consumers to align their shareholder interests to doing the right fucking thing. Boycotts and other consumer action are part of their calculations on what the shareholder interests are, so a large population of informed consumers who vote their conscience with their wallet will provide pressure to do the right thing.
So we must become the shareholders?
Target is under more pressure than companies like Walmart, John Deere or Tractor Supply, because Target went further in its DEI efforts, and it has a more progressive base of customers than those competitors.
This is wild move for a company on its arse anyway.
Can we add bigger offenders like Wal-Mart and Amazon?
That is the part that pisses me off so much about this. Yes. Target capitulated. Yes, Target needs to be told that’s not good.
BUT WALTONS FUND THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION!
This can’t be said enough, yet we can’t get a days boycott on them for fucks sake!
Looks like the Federalist Society is connected, too. It’s like the Who’s Who of Homogeny, Exclusion, and Inequity. Somebody give me an L-word so we can call them what they are.
I’m not doing the whole “Everyone I don’t agree with is a Nazi.” I mean, very specifically, this is the strategy used by unaccountable, ultrawealthy people to wield their power recklessly for an extremist movement that they’re going to lose control of. It just happens to be the best-known, contemporary archetypal, right-wing-flavor of the revolutionary bait-and-switch.
People need awareness, motivation and organization. If you can help with that, go for it.
Right? And why not just boycott all pubkically traded companies forever? 40 days doesn’t do much
Because if you propose that, no one is actually going to do it.
Doing something is always more impactful than shooting for everything and ending up doing nothing. This is a great example of a smartly thought out mass movement; it has a specific goal, and a clearly defined set of terms. Remember, you can always expand or extend. It’s far better to get a small thing moving than try to build a big thing that you never finish.
Also, 40 days is long enough that some people are going to change their shopping habits on a more permanent basis. Creating even a longer impact on Target.
I don’t get why anyone complains about fixed term boycotts anyway. You can just add another 40 days if Target doesn’t get the message. It’s not like you’re signing a contract or something. Boycotts are a negotiation, and in negotiation you always leave yourself wiggle room.
People love to get into this “Only the biggest possible action and nothing else” mindset, and then never actually take any action at all.
Further, a lot of dirt poor people literally rely on Walmart because Walmart was successful at gutting every other business out of their already dirt poor areas. That was literally Walmart’s business model to undersell the competition until they were the only game in town, it’s how they got so huge so fast. Large swathes of the South are like that. There’s a reason they teach their employees how to sign up for food stamps.
100%, perfect is the enemy of good. But it makes little logical sense to give any of these corporations any money or data
If you’re on the highway, need a coffee, and Starbucks is the only thing around, buy the Starbucks.
If Amazon is the only place you can buy that thing you need, buy it from Amazon.
There are plenty of times when the bad option is the only good option. If we teach people that boycotts have to be all or nothing - if we get into this mindset that a single latte means you’re an evil monster who supports genocide - we just engineer a state of despair.
But if we encourage people to reduce rather than cut out, we set an easily achievable goal. And that means it’s a goal that a lot more people will strive for.
If you want to cut out every big corporation entirely from your life, that’s an admirable personal goal, but not one that seems easy or achievable to most people.
I’m definitely with you on that in spirit. I would starve if I actually practiced that across the board. I figure if we start from the top down, maybe we can get the co-ops to come back. Our neighborhood co-op grocery closed down not too long ago, and all that’s left are national chains.
I think it’s fair to commit to reducing your purchasing from these large entities significantly. By design, these companies have made it basically impossible to get certain products except from them, so do what you need to do in those cases. But you can get a lot still from alternatives.
I’m a huge advocate of what I call “soft boycotting.” You don’t have to all or nothing this stuff. If a million people reduce their spending on a company by only ten percent, that’s just as much damage as ten thousand people dropping them entirely. And it’s a lot easier to get a million people to reduce their spending by a little than it is to get ten thousand people to go cold turkey.
Remember, perfect is the enemy of good. A small action taken is worth far more than a big action only imagined.
Yeah co-ops are amazing, I’m always astounded when I find cities that don’t have any
Better than these one day protests that LITERALLY do nothing. At least a 40 day boycott would hit a fiscal month, vs a single day outlier protest.
Join me, I’ve been boycotting them for years.
There is supposed to be a weeklong boycott of Amazon this month, I forget the exact date.
March 7-14
Removed by mod
What a lazy troll, did your attention seeking behavior get you what you want?
Worthless people buying worthless crap.
“Yes daddy lick those boots. Go buy $11 eggs and a $40 hdmi cable from target. Mmmm the leather tastes so good”
- you probably
Just curious as to why you would want to shop there now because of this boycott? Not judging just curious.
Like it seems you didn’t shop there but now it’s contrarian to do you want to.
Conservatives are literally only contrarians. If the left does anything, the right only wants to do the opposite no matter what it is. There is nothing the right will ever do to say “that’s a great idea!” Because that’s considered losing to them.
“Hey let’s give kids free school lunch!” “NO! That makes them only want handouts and the children should work”.
They have the mental capacity of a child and it’s hurting everyone.
I wouldn’t want to generalise everybody but I honestly can’t comprehend how anybody would want to act like that.
Like my views are based on what I believe is right and what a society should be based on my morals and not just the opposite of some other people. I find it odd.
I don’t even know if I believe conservatives to be bad people and more I assume they’ve been lied to and it’s hard to get them to see the truth.
He is just trolling. It’s a MAGA thing.
Because they only know how to be against something
