“In the first quarter, our team navigated a highly challenging environment and focused on delivering the outstanding assortment, experience and value guests expect from Target. While our sales fell short of our expectations, we saw several bright spots in the quarter, including healthy digital growth, led by a 36 percent increase in same-day delivery through Target Circle 360, and our strongest designer collaboration in more than a decade, kate spade for Target. While these highlights reinforce our confidence in the underlying health of our business, we’re not satisfied with current performance and know we have opportunities to deliver faster progress on our roadmap for growth,” says Target CEO Brian Cornell in the retailer’s Q1 2024 earnings statement, not mentioning the boycott movement over its rollback of DEI policies in submission to the Trump regime.

That’s upfront in the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the earnings statement, crediting the pro-DEI movement’s impact for a 3.8 percent sales decline from Q1 2024. Cornell did acknowledge this on a call with reporters that must’ve been held at some ungodly hour this morning, saying that, while he couldn’t estimate how much the boycott was responsible for the loss, it “played a role in our first-quarter performance.” The CEO vaguely committed to a correction by making Target a place where their “guests and our teams and our partners feel included,” whatever that’s going to mean.

Cornell also blamed lower spending on discretionary items amid a broad decline in consumer confidence but did not assign blame to you-know-who for creating that environment rather than fulfilling his bullshit campaign promises to lower costs for all Americans. Obviously having enough self-inflicted problems to deal with, Cornell barely mentioned tariffs, saying only “we have many levers we can use to mitigate this impact, and price is the very last resort” to mitigate their impact.