Poor Target, redux

Brian Cornell stepped down as CEO, and the board chose a white man who’s been with the company for 20 years to take the top spot. None of this is surprising from a company that’s been fucking up constantly for the last decade, starting with totally dropping all prosocial management processes from stores so employee morale is in the toilet, and continuing with selling out their core customers by dumping DEI and then seeming Just Shocked when we all boycotted them. I rehashed all of that in this post from May.

But it gets worse. The new/old guy, Michael Fiddleke, has biiiiig plans to fix the stuff that’s tanked Target. And his big plans have nothing to do with the problems and everything to do with seeming to think he’s on spring break in Panama City Beach circa 2004. Here’s what he said from this article in the AP:

Fiddelke said he would step in as CEO with three urgent priorities: reclaiming the company’s position as a leader in selecting and displaying merchandise; improving the customer experience by making sure shelves are consistently stocked and stores are clean; and investing in technology.

“When we’re leading with swagger in our merchandising authority, when we have swagger in our marketing and we’re setting the trend for retail, those are some of the moments I think that Target has been at its highest in my 20 years,” Fiddelke said.

Oy. Fndamental misunderstanding of what went wrong AND CONTINUES TO GO WRONG because we’ve been boycotting them for 6 months now and have found our workarounds so we might not even notice if the stores all closed. And the idea that merchandising is going to make amends and make things right with either the employees they’ve hurt or the former clients they’ve hurt is just ludicrous.

A new CEO ought to come in and focus on mending the relationship with their former core customers. Really make amends, particularly with Black and LGBTQ+ customers, and mend all their relationships with Black brands and suppliers. Including writing into their contracts that these suppliers would be paid out big sums of money if Target ever acted in less than welcoming ways to Black customers.

But this is just more of the same bullshit. So many missed opportunities. And these men truly do not care and are unable to ever get it.