Target suffers 10th consecutive week of foot traffic declines, sinking stock prices since caving on DEI

As its stock dropped to a four-year low on April 4, Target also saw its foot traffic drop for the 10th consecutive week, a traffic slump that began the week after Target announced it was cancelling its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program in January.

For the week that began March 31, Target saw foot traffic drop 7.9% YoY, its worst drop since the week beginning February 17, when it dropped 8.1%, according to data from Placer.ai.

Costco, which defied demands from the Trump administration for private companies to spike their DEI programs, notched its 15th straight week of foot-traffic gains, although this week just by the skin of its teeth, with a gain of 0.3%.

The big-box retailers’ stock prices are trending in opposite directions, too, with their graph curves resembling up and down escalators criss-crossing at the mall.

Target stock dropped to a four-year low of $88.76 a share on April 6, from a high of $266.38 a share on November 15, 2021. Costco stock hit its four-year high of $968.99 on February 12, from a low of $363.87 on April 13, 2021.

Target did not respond to Retail Brew’s request for comment.

Bunny slope: On a March 4 earnings call, Target CEO Brian Cornell disclosed that there was a “sales decline” in February without specifying how large a decline, but he was bullish about the retailer’s Easter assortment selling briskly, saying the company was “looking forward to Easter.”

However, the day before that pronouncement, however, a 40-plus-day plus Lenten boycott spearheaded by Black pastors—which now has more than 150,000 participants, according to its organizers—began against Target. That boycott lasts through Easter, April 20.

As we noted in our previous dispatch, on the week beginning March 24—which included six of seven days of Target’s deep-discount sales event, Circle Week, not to mention that Easter assortment about which Cornell was so optimistic—foot traffic still fell.

Meanwhile, a deal that when inked in 2020 was lauded as a foot-traffic generator for Target, namely the placement of Ulta Beauty mini-stores within Targets, hit a snag on April 3, when Ulta CEO Kecia Steelman told an analyst conference that the retailers were hitting pause on plans to expand the program. For years, both Target and Ulta said the goal was to add the shop-in-shops in 800 stores; they paused almost 25% short of that goal, at 610 stores.