THE MORNING RANT: Mega-Woke Retailer Target “Unexpectedly” Has Another Disappointing Quarter with Declining Top-Line Revenue

Since May 2023, when Target precipitated a ferocious backlash with its collection of “Pride Month” merchandise targeted at children, I’ve been monitoring Target’s quarterly financial performance. Target’s wokeness goes far beyond its vulgar, inappropriate children’s merchandise, of course. As I documented a few months ago, Target has also welcomed men into its women’s restrooms and prohibited police from arresting shoplifters in its stores.

Target’s embrace of degeneracy has repelled customers, caused a decrease in store traffic, hurt its earnings, and most importantly, it has caused a top line reduction in revenue. Sales are lower. No matter what clever metric is being touted (margins, adjusted earnings, etc), nothing can change the fact that the top line revenue number started going down after Pride Month (June) 2023 and Target can’t reverse the trend, because those lost customers aren’t coming back. Coincidentally enough, while Target is seeing decreasing same-store sales, Walmart is seeing increasing same-store sales. Walmart is also gaining new customers while Target is losing customers.

Wall Street “experts” and analysts keep being surprised by Target’s revenue and earnings problems, and they must then try to explain why the company keeps falling short of Wall Street estimates. Yet none of the analyses I’ve read has acknowledged that there is significant anti-woke boycott that persists against Target. The business press strangely blames “inflation battered” households for not spending money at Target, while simultaneously reporting elsewhere that inflation has been defeated and that consumers are doing great, causing the stock market to reach record highs due to consumers’ joyful and abundant spending.

Well, Target just released its earnings report for the quarter ended 3/31/2024 and it was another “unexpectedly” bad quarter, falling short of “expert” predictions, with same-store sales continuing to show a year-over-year decline.

“Target earnings miss the mark as inflation-battered shoppers avoid buying things they don't really need” [Yahoo Finance – 5/22/2024]

Target (TGT) missed the earnings mark in the first quarter. Blame inflation-battered US households, its execs say. The "biggest challenges" Target is hearing about from its shoppers are "inflation in food and household essentials," chairman and CEO Brian Cornell said on a call with reporters detailing first quarter results.

By contrast, just a few days earlier Wal Mart reported exceptional results for the same quarter, with its CFO stating, “We’ve got customers that are coming to us more frequently than they have before and newer customers that we haven’t traditionally had.”

“…customers that we haven’t traditionally had.” In other words, customers who used to shop at Target are now shopping at Walmart.

This Forbes Business piece lists some of the lowlights of Target’s disastrous quarter. Here is a comparison of Target’s quarterly results to Wal Mart’s:

Total Quarterly Revenue compared to prior-year Quarter
• Wal Mart: Up 6.0%
• Target: Down 3.1%

Same-store Quarterly Revenue compared to prior-year Quarter
• Wal Mart: Up 3.8%
• Target: Down 3.7%

Total Quarterly Operating Income compared to prior-year Quarter
• Wal Mart: Up 9.6%
• Target: Down 2.4%

The CNBC piece I linked above regarding Wal Mart’s success comically points out that inflation is low again, which benefits Wal Mart.

This week brought promising news for Walmart and other retailers: Inflation eased in April, according to the Labor Department data released Wednesday. The consumer price index was up 3.4% year over year.

So if I’ve got this right, Target is suffering from high inflation – not an anti-woke boycott – yet that same high inflation somehow doesn’t hurt Wal Mart, but it’s all good, because inflation is not actually high, just 3.4% per year. Thank God I’m not a “legitimate” business journalist trying to contort myself into promoting this self-contradictory propaganda.

Related, despite Target’s decreasing revenue and disappointing earnings, its stock price has been soaring. It exceeded $170 per share just last month, which was higher than before the Pride Month debacle started for Target a year ago. If investors are still recklessly driving up the stock price of a fading retailer with declining sales – a retailer which is also despised by much of its potential customer base - there is clearly some irrational exuberance in the market.

Don’t let up. The boycott is hurting Target, which is much more likely to follow the path of Sears and K-Mart than it is to ever regain sales lost to Walmart.

My latest piece at The Pipeline, Just Stop ‘Just Stop Oil’, has been published.

In it I take a dive into Just Stop Oil, the crime wave funded by its parent organization (Climate Emergency Fund), and the prominent, old-money benefactors who are funding it all. Incredibly, it’s all tax deductible for those rich leftists, because Climate Emergency Fund is a tax exempt 501(c)(3) organization.

Do the wealthy benefactors of CEF and Just Stop Oil openly support those organizations’ activities? Yes and no. The illegal yet “peaceful” civil disobedience is celebrated, while the actual violence has a degree of separation allowing the benefactors to claim “no direct control.”

Per Climate Emergency Fund’s own website, it also provides funding to Germany’s “Letzte Generation” (Last Generation), an organization so radical and violent that even the German Green Party has disavowed it, as several of its members were arrested last year for plotting to sabotage an oil pipeline.

What to do? For starters. the Climate Emergency Fund should be stripped of its 501(c)(3) status, and the prosecution of crimes committed under its umbrella can no longer just target the street “activists” committing the crimes.

I’d be honored if you’d give it a read.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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