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On Wednesday morning, just hours before Target’s much-anticipated quarterly earnings call, the embattled retailer made a notable announcement: CEO Brian Cornell will relinquish his position after 11 years on the job, stepping back to chair the board of directors that had just unanimously voted to appoint COO Michael Fiddelke as his successor. True, Cornell had come to the end of a three-year contract extension he’d signed in 2022, but the actual reasons for this switchover seemed obvious. “It is clear that Michael is the right leader to return Target to growth,” the board announced, citing his initiatives “that enabled exponential growth.” Cornell likewise shouted out Fiddelke’s “deep passion for growth,” while Fiddelke recognized that “I step into the role with an urgent commitment to drive growth.”
Growth—part of the mission statement for any large for-profit corporation, yes, but an especially timely one for the Minneapolis-headquartered shopping giant, which has spent the past two years facing down anti-LGBTQ+ right-wingers, public frustration with understaffed outposts, postpandemic shifts in consumption trends, controversial product lockups made in response to the ginned-up shoplifting panic, supply issues aggravated by imports and tariffs, and a nationwide boycott led by Black and brown customers opposed to the company’s rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments. All of which has fueled concurrent declines in sales, revenue, foot traffic, and stock value—especially throughout this year.
The earnings call that followed the CEO shake-up only affirmed that sorry trend. Over the past three months, Target’s earnings have plunged 20 percent from the same period last year, with sales revenue and profits inching downward as a result. Although measures like digital transactions improved a touch from the early-year slump, they weren’t enough to make up for a crushing first quarter. On top of that, investors hungering for a new CEO had hoped Cornell’s replacement would arrive from outside Target; instead, the board picked a 20-year company veteran. In a brutal post-call note to his clients, one prominent retail consultant wrote that Target “has lost its grip on delivering for the American shopper.” The corporation’s pandemic-era highs are but a distant memory, with its stock value having plummeted by 64 percent since the summer of 2021.
But for all the contributing factors to Target’s no good, very bad 2025, the clear standout, to both the investors and the public, is DEI. During the previous earnings call, in May, Cornell had explicitly acknowledged “the reaction to the updates we shared on [DEI] in January” as one of “several headwinds” that the company was facing this year. Jamal Bryant, the Georgia pastor who’s been spearheading the nationwide Target-boycott movement since February, did not yet claim victory and told the digital news source Capital B Atlanta that the boycott would continue, although he plans to meet with Fiddelke and “share what our concerns are.”
Target is hardly the only name-brand institution to have backtracked on prior DEI commitments in recent years, in response to either conservative “anti-woke” campaigns or Trump administration hostility toward the very concept. Some CEOs still have nightmares about the transphobic Bud Light boycott following TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s 2023 ad; others are gleefully dismissing employee pressure to play their own part in addressing America’s systemic bigotry, whether by materially supporting minority-owned nonprofits and businesses, hiring applicants from underrepresented communities, or mandating workplace sensitivity trainings. To be clear, there were plenty of corporate DEI efforts that were counterproductive to the purported cause, serving mainly to burnish a corporation’s image or to wave away employee and investor requests for more foundational changes to business as usual. But the very existence of these initiatives—the thrust of which still finds support among significant proportions of Americans—served as a broader indicator that executives (correctly) perceived their nods to increased workforce diversification and tolerant internal environments as being good for business.
In fact, Target once credited DEI as a key driver to its success. In the wake of the Bud Light controversy, Cornell himself told Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast that he was “really proud” of Target’s DEI commitments, noting that “focus on diversity and inclusion and equity has fueled much of our growth over the last nine years.” (There’s that word again: growth!) Achievements like increased representation of women in leadership, Spanish-language signage in Latino communities, and contracts with minority-owned suppliers were simply “good business decisions,” but also “the right thing for society” and “a great thing for our brand.” For Target, it was also a bit personal: With its operations concentrated in the very city at the center of the 2020 unrest (and where a Target location was damaged during the ensuing protests), Cornell noted that George Floyd “could have been one of my Target team members.” The turnaround this year, despite such strong statements, was what really shocked Black leaders like Bryant.
But Target had also been steadily backtracking for a while. Anti-LGBTQ+ Republicans riding high off the success of their Bud Light campaign soon made Target their next … target, successfully bullying the retailer into removing its once prominent Pride Month–themed merchandise across several stores. The timing of this backlash, arising right as Target’s business began to suffer hits from postpandemic shopping trends, likely prompted Cornell to ensure that future iterations of Pride branding literally wore less pro-LGBTQ+ sentiments on their sleeves.
Yet what Cornell clearly missed is that Target is far less vulnerable to the effects of anti-“DEI” campaigns—now expanded by MAGA bigots to encompass even basic acknowledgments of marginalized communities by any institution—than the Bud Lights of America. As CNN Business has frequently pointed out, Target has a “more progressive base of customers” than many of the other companies harangued by conservatives. The daughters of Target’s founder wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times in February decrying this caving by Target and other corporations as “undermining the very principles that have made their companies a success.” And the Trump administration’s own attacks on DEI have run into legal challenges.
Notably, the companies that have recognized this and acted accordingly are doing much better these days. Costco leadership made a big show of rejecting an anti-DEI shareholder resolution introduced by a conservative think tank, and it has avoided the steep falls in store visits that have hit newly DEI-phobic chains like Target and Walmart. (However, it has also displeased liberal customers by refusing to stock mifepristone.) John Deere, which shed its DEI commitments last year after right-wing social media backlash, saw investors reject a similar resolution to Costco’s not long after Trump’s inauguration. Apple’s happy investors have also made their pro-DEI stance clear, even as CEO Tim Cook attempts to mollify an unhappy Trump with gold-plated gifts. As Axios found in a survey, companies that have stuck to their DEI policies (e.g., Delta Air Lines, Kroger, Patagonia) have better reputations with their employees and the broader public; Walmart, which initially cowed on diversity thanks to conservatives, has since joined Target in warning investors that opposition to DEI rollbacks could affect its sales.
It remains to be seen if other companies should also worry. Big Tech firms that have eagerly sucked up to Trump have the privilege of avoiding blowback, considering their monopolistic positions in their sectors. (The recent sell-offs in their stocks have more to do with jitters over poor A.I. investment returns than with anything else.) But there are rolling waves of boycotts planned for multiple other DEI-less companies, including actions against Uber and PepsiCo to be held next month. A Harris poll from February found that about 25 percent of respondents had stopped going to favored stores for moral reasons, a trend that was especially heightened among Democratic and Black Americans; a follow-up poll in March found that majorities of Gen Z, Black, and Latino respondents were joining such boycotts. Indeed, shoppers of color are persisting in the charge against corporate America’s turn away from underprivileged communities.
The effectiveness of such boycotts will be dependent on myriad factors, including consumer demographics, the market power, and the ability to withstand pressure from the federal government. But the Target shake-up might just be a Bud Light moment for pro-DEI activists. Five years after the summer of 2020, Black Americans have not forgotten the promises made. No matter what Trump or the reactionary commentariat would have you believe, more companies that choose to ditch woke may go broke.
