The above screenshot is from the AFA website, where the Boycott Target Pledge has now surpassed a million signers. After the news broke recently about Target’s preposterous policy of allowing any man to use the women’s restroom for any reason (and vice versa), which they masqueraded as “inclusiveness” for “transgender” customers and staff, the backlash was fast and has not stopped growing. Videos are being shared on Facebook of parents objecting, undercover videos show the nonexistent standards and total lack of safety and security for women and girls, letters and op-eds have been written and, now, money has been lost.
A lot of it.
From The Blaze:
Shares of Target Corporation Common Stock (TGT) have fallen from $84.14 a share on April 19 to $79.27 a share as of Friday evening, 10 days after the transgender policy was enacted.
The stock price had fallen by 2.52 percent on Friday alone, as of 4 p.m. Ultimately, the drop “would represent a corporate loss of over $2.5 billion,” according to the Family Policy Institute.
Ouch! And it’s not just a short term valuation problem for investors, the brand is suffering too. In an article where USA Today struggles mightily to remain on Target’s side and minimize the apparent impact, even they still have to admit and report the actual fact, which is:
Target has seen a dip in people who say they’d consider shopping there the next time they need something, according to data compiled by YouGov BrandIndex, a research company that conducts daily surveys measuring brand perception.
Before Target made its policy public last week, 42% of people said they would consider shopping there the next time they needed something. As of Wednesday, that number had dropped to 38%, which YouGov CEO Ted Marzilli says is a “significant” shift.
Of course their brand is suffering.
Look, this is not a difficult thing to grasp. In fact, those who continue to purport not to understand the backlash or disgustingly try to smear it as some kind of “transphobia” are just being willfully blind and dishonest. They are scraping for kudos from the feel-good, do-nothing crowd. Look at me, I’m “tolerant”! But it’s not a hard issue. Target said men can go into a woman’s bathroom and that women who aren’t comfortable with that can basically go jump in a lake. They don’t care. Because progressives don’t care.
Their policy, as has been amply and ably demonstrated, is exactly what I said last weekend.
A man, dressed as a man, who does not claim to be a woman, and does not claim to identify as a woman, may use the restroom designated for women if he feels more comfortable there.
This is a nonsense policy and people with sense simply aren’t going to stand for it. And leftists wouldn’t stand for making women uncomfortable in this way under any other circumstance. But in the never-ending democrat war of identity, it’s clear which demographic holds the “most aggrieved” status at the moment.
The best thing I’ve read so far on this, though, is from that same USA Today article.
“I don’t think it’s a statement that people aren’t in favor of equal rights for transgender people,” Marzilli says regarding what the data show. “It shows people just kind of demonstrating that they’re uncomfortable, or uncertain about how comfortable they are, with mixed public restrooms.”
That’s brilliant. It’s meant to be a defense of Target’s “intent” but what it actually does is prove exactly how these stupid, thoughtless corporate overtures to liberal outrage, and their myriad unintended (not not unforeseeable) consequences, work out. Which is to say, really badly. Of course people are uncomfortable with mixed public bathrooms. And here’s a news flash: that matters!!
Corporate America: Learn from Target’s mistakes. Just because the self-righteous celebrities and self-indulgent rich people like Donald Trump that you hang around with make you feel socially pressured to cater to leftist ideas doesn’t mean you should. They may seem loud, but the rest of America can be a lot louder when we want to be. About 2.5 billion times as loud.
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