When we last left Target, they had just taken another stock plunge, losing more than $13 billion in market value. They were at 131.23 on Friday morning and were on the longest losing streak in 23 years.
They’re now even lower, at 130.20.
But perhaps even more problematic for them is that they received another downgrade.
KeyBanc Capital Markets, on Monday, cut the retailer’s shares to “sector weight” from “overweight” as the resumption of student loan payments stipulated by Congress’ debt ceiling agreement poses a sizable headwind for discretionary spending for shoppers, which has an elevated discretionary sales mix and a younger, college-educated core consumer demographic.
Add that to the downgrade they got from JP Morgan that I wrote about on Friday, which specifically cited the “recent company controversies” and said this share loss could get worse, and you know they’re in some serious difficulty.
But the problem Target also faces — now that they’ve gone down this road — is that people are scrutinizing everything they do and finding more problematic instances where they appear to be taking political positions.
For example, Target — through its nonprofit foundation — has provided funding for the NDN Collective. Among the things NDN is fighting against is Mount Rushmore, which they term “white supremacy.”
The organization’s campaign “LANDBACK” called for America to give up its public land.
“The closure of Mount Rushmore, return of that land and all public lands in the Black Hills, South Dakota is our cornerstone battle,” NDN said. “Not only does Mount Rushmore sit in the heart of the sacred Black Hills, but it is an international symbol of White supremacy and colonization. To truly dismantle white supremacy and systems of oppression, we have to go back to the roots. Which, for us, is putting Indigenous Lands back in Indigenous hands.”
NDN also has a dim view of the U.S. military.
[T]he U.S. military is in the explicit business of taking land away from communities all around the world and using their presence on their land to carry out their own agenda for the inhabitants of that area. Violence is fundamental for the U.S. to maintain its presence, and the military is how they establish dominance domestically and internationally, wherever they may be.
They also hold a warped view of American history, which they used to taint the military now.
“The origin of the U.S. military and police is rooted in the establishment of informal militias composed of newly arrived settlers looking to make money and own land,” NDN said “The purpose of these informal militias however was not to keep the police or protect citizens, but to clear the land of as many Natives as possible by killing indiscriminately, and catching runaway enslaved Africans.”
Fox asked Target why it would support an organization like this while also claiming to support veterans in its corporate announcements. Neither Target nor NDN responded to Fox’s inquiries immediately.
We’ve already written about how Target supports an organization that would keep parents in the dark about their children being treated as a different gender by the school.
About the best you can say for them is that they didn’t take a deeper plunge when the market opened on Monday, but as the JP Morgan analyst observed, there are likely more losses to come.