03/08/2025
Open Letter to the People of Target.
Apologize. Get Back to DEI. Win Everything!
I feel for you. You want to find a spot to be where everyone is happy with you. But that spot no longer exists. Now no one is happy with you. You have what seem like very hard decisions to make. You need to make those decisions now.
I’m here to help. In many ways Penzeys has pioneered this road. We’ve learned things along the way. I know what it’s like to not know how your business will survive this moment you are in. But I also know what it’s like to arrive at the light at the end of the tunnel. And I know that light can be there for you as well.
I also know the decisions you need to make are not hard at all because you really only have one path forward. The Trump-voting, anti-DEI crowd will never be your customers. They’ve never trusted you.
And even if they were your customers, you couldn’t make a living off of them. Have your people run the numbers. Trump loves the uneducated, but what leaves people gullible also leaves them short on spending cash. Plus, look at the profiles of the people leaving negative comments on our previous posts. They’ve mostly aged out of their consuming years.
They’ve bought their last coat. They aren’t excited for a new swimsuit. They aren’t thinking about what they will need to make the transition from a kid's bedroom to a teen's bedroom. Their children left long ago. Their best buying days are behind them.
If there’s one defining trait to the anti-DEI crowd it’s their unified desire to return the country to a past that no longer exists. Are you really thinking a past that no longer exists is where you will find Target’s future? This is not a tough call.
But it is a call to be made quickly. Budweiser survived the collapse in sales that came with abandoning its support for the transgender community and Tesla so far has survived Musk’s promotion of fascism because they are manufacturers and for the most part manufacturing can be scaled back.
Retail isn’t scalable. When your stores drop 20% in sales it doesn’t mean a 20% drop in profits, it means going from a little profitable to hemorrhaging cash. Those hemorrhaging don’t get seated in the waiting room at the ER. Though once Musk turns his attention to healthcare, who knows what savings he will find :)
And worse than the cash is that right now you are hemorrhaging customers at an alarming rate. Good customers who, over generations, have been made loyal by your decency. The problem isn’t people boycotting you. It’s that those boycotting you are doing the right thing.
Your past retreat from the LGBTQ+ community took the fun out of shopping with you. Your pulling the rug out from under all those DEI stands up for has now made shopping with you painful. You’ve earned this boycott. My advice is quit digging.
I’m not entirely sure about who is behind this 40-day boycott for Lent. Mega churches make me nervous. But so far they seem to have done everything just right. And if you are holding out hope that after 40 days things will go back to normal, don’t. It won’t.
If you don’t make this right before the 40 days is up, those people won’t be coming back and all the goodness and all the goodwill of 40 years of Target always finding a way to be the company doing the right thing will have been lost. My heart breaks at that.
Every day the cost to you grows exponentially. The time to act is now. Coincidentally enough, this coming Wednesday the 12th is Captain Boycott’s birthday. Seems a fitting day to announce a change of plans and issue a heartfelt and truly sincere apology to everyone who you’ve left feeling abandoned these past years.
At the heart of any apology that has any chance of meaning anything is not just an admission of doing wrong, but the very real expression that to continue doing that wrong is against everything you want yourself to be.
If you currently don’t have that real person in leadership it’s time to make a change. Hopefully you have that person now. If not, there are still so many people who were connected to all the goodness Target achieved. Place one of them in charge. An insincere apology will do more harm than good.
And yes, no matter what, there’s some red ink ahead. But from all I’ve seen, from all I’ve experienced, I truly believe you doing the right thing and standing up for all your customers is also the right thing for your bottom line as well.
At Penzeys, we saw the writing on the wall. Yes, the unlimited political spending by business brought on by the Citizens United ruling meant we would arrive at this government by chaos we now see. But ultimately it will usher in an era where no business can expect the support of their customers without actively supporting their customers.
For so long people gave no thought to what the support of where they shop meant to them. Eight years ago when we called out the Republican party’s embrace of racism we lost a lot of racist Republicans as customers. But there was no corresponding surge in support.
Maybe we are not fully there yet, but we’ve at least arrived at the point where people like to shop with companies that make them happy. They are starting to not only get it, but also starting to want more of it.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said they wished they could buy everything at Penzeys and never need to shop anywhere else, I would have a big ol’ sock full of nickels.
And it’s only growing. You can fool some of the people all the time, but those temporarily fooled into believing Trump wasn’t running to usher in the fascism of Project 2025 but believed he would bring down prices starting day one are waking up. And if history is any indicator (and it always is), soon these voters will be angry. Really angry.
For the view from history buy/rent the movie Casablanca. Watch it all, but pay extra attention at the one hour and forty one minute mark. As the film is winding up, Rick’s new friend Captain Renault goes to pour a drink of water when, almost as if for the first time, he sees that the bottle has Vichy on the label. Vichy was the capital of N**i occupied France. The Captain ditches the bottle in the trash.
Today’s Vichy is everyone sitting in the billionaires' section at the inaugural. Today’s Vichy soon enough will be Amazon.
A Target embracing DEI right up until the Supreme Court tries to pry it from Target’s hands wins the future. Here in America. Everywhere else, too.
A Target that abandons all the goodness it was built on and runs away from LGBTQ+ and DEI is a Target that is the new K-Mart.
Just for proposing this past Thursday that it’s worth trying to save what Target once was brought me a good number of righteously angry emails from good people. I get it. They are not the business they were. But I have hope that the door to what they were has not fully closed yet.
Do the right thing and we will be here to help any way we can. At times in the past you’ve reached out to us to come up with a private label spice blend for you. I didn’t see the point. But now maybe that everything bagel seasoning I’ve been dragging my feet on is the blend of the Return to DEI real America is waiting for. Feel free to get in touch.
And as is our way, this is actually an ad. If you like what we are doing in general or just want to see the reach of this post to grow, buy some spices.
Our bigger 7-jar regularly $44.95 Rise & Shine Breakfast box with the happy woke mug on the cover is just $20. You can find it here: https://www.penzeys.com/online-catalog/rise-shine-gift-box/c-24/p-3055/pd-gb
The pictured Outrage of Love Seasoning that makes it so easy to bring tasty goodness to most everything can be found here: https://www.penzeys.com/online-catalog/outrage-of-love/c-24/p-4370/pd-s
Plus a free $7.95 Kind Heart pin is free with any purchase in hopes of Target returning to the open promotion of the kindness to all that meant so much to generations of customers. You can see the pin here: https://www.penzeys.com/online-catalog/kind-heart-pin/c-24/p-3116/pd-s
These offers are good in our stores as well, but to make free shipping easier to reach we’ve dropped it from free with $49 in spending to free with just $40, so if you buy two Rise & Shine boxes you are all set.
And no, we are in no way saying Target has done what it needs to do to end the boycott. It hasn’t. What we are saying is a boycott is only a stick. As cooks we believe in carrots as well.
Should Target make the right call and return to openly promoting DEI and get back to supporting the LGBTQ+ community even when there are Republicans in the room, we need to be ready to support Target and reward them for doing what is right even if we were mad at them the day before. Thanks.
And 7-jar regularly $44.95 Rise & Shine Breakfast boxes with the happy woke mug on the cover for just $20 each. Buy two: one to keep, one to share and regular shipping will be free. It’s right here: https://www.penzeys.com/online-catalog/rise-shine-gift-box/c-24/p-3055/pd-gb
Thanks for cooking. Thanks for caring. Outrage of Love makes outrageously tasty roasted carrots.
Please pass this along to the Target people in you life,
Bill
[email protected]
