As Target faces issues on multiple fronts, these once-loyal shoppers are still boycotting the chain 

“For me, shopping at Target was like a whole experience,” she said.

But now, Jackson hasn’t shopped at Target in approximately six months. She’s one of a number of Americans who say they are still boycotting Target after the big-box chain sent a memo to employees in January, stating that it would be pulling back on some of its major diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. That included rebranding its supplier diversity program, which focused on increasing the number of women, veteran and minority-owned businesses target worked with, to a supplier engagement program. 

For Jackson, the news was personal. She’s worked in the past as a DEI consultant, and she knows the impact these programs can have on minority business owners. 

“As a Black woman, I feel like we already always get left behind and abandoned,” she said. When asked if she believes other people are still boycotting Target, she said that, at least among her friends, “anyone who has stopped going to Target has not gone back.” 

News of Target boycotts dominated the headlines in January when Minneapolis civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong called for shoppers to boycott the chain starting Feb. 1 in response to the DEI pullback. That same month, the prominent pastor Jamal Bryant called for a 40-day boycott of Target, coinciding with Lent. 

Since then, as Target’s problems have piled up, news of the boycotts has largely faded from headlines. But, foot traffic to Target stores has been largely down year-over-year, according to data sources like Placer.AI. That’s left some shoppers wondering on social media how many people are actually still boycotting Target, while analysts and research firms are pouring out various cross-sections of data, trying to see where impacts of any boycott may be most prominently felt. 

Anecdotally, there are shoppers who say they are still boycotting Target — Modern Retail spoke with half a dozen of them over the past couple of months. Many of them are shoppers who have boycotted other chains in the past, like Amazon and Walmart. Some of them were previously power shoppers who once visited the chain once a week and haven’t bought a single thing since the boycotts kicked off in earnest. Others say they haven’t been able to avoid the chain entirely.

The data is more complicated. Target’s sales were down during the first quarter, with foot traffic to stores dropping 2.4%. On the company’s earnings call, CEO Brian Cornell said the company faced several headwinds during the quarter, “including five consecutive months of declining consumer confidence, uncertainty regarding the impact of potential tariffs and the reaction to the updates we shared on belonging in January.” He went on to say that, “while we believe each of these factors played a role in our first-quarter performance, we can’t reliably estimate the impact of each one separately.” 

Some researchers and analysts who have examined foot traffic data based on demographics or location in search of patterns say there’s little evidence that certain groups of consumers are still boycotting Target en masse. Target declined to provide a comment for this article; the company is reporting second quarter earnings on Wednesday, so an update on how it is doing at winning back shoppers is likely to come then. 

Still, it all makes Target’s comeback more difficult at a time when the retailer is facing issues on multiple other fronts. A big CNBC feature earlier this year interviewed analysts and shoppers about what they believe have been Target’s biggest operational missteps, which revealed challenges like keeping items in-stock as Target has increasingly used stores to fulfill online orders. Then, the Wall Street Journal reported last week findings from a recent internal employee survey, which showed that about 40% of respondents don’t have confidence in the company’s future. Last week, Target also revealed its shop-in-shop partnership with Ulta Beauty is coming to an end next year. And speculation is flying about who may replace current CEO Brian Cornell, given that his contract is set to end before the year is up. 

And the risk for Target is that more people will stop viewing a Target run as vital for buying everything they need. After all, major competitors like Walmart, Amazon and Costco are working to step up their offerings and convince shoppers that they offer the best mix of value and convenience.

Some of the shoppers interviewed by Modern Retail said that, even if they did start shopping at Target again, they can’t see themselves shopping as frequently as they used to. 

“Looking back, I’m kind of shocked myself at how often I was shopping there,” said Erika Jeter, a shopper who lives in the Boston, Massachusetts area.

What shoppers say 

For different reasons, many of the shoppers interviewed said that they had historically felt that Target was a more progressive company than other big-box chains. Jeter, for example, said she had a positive association with Target given how often it promoted Black-owned businesses. “I always took a little bit of pride that they stood up for the LGBT community,” said shopper Nikki Pearson. And Jeremy Stromberg of St. Paul, Minnesota recalled seeing bulletins in Target stores about how much a particular store gave to local charities that year and positively remembered the various ways Target has donated supplies to local schools. 

Media coverage also painted Target as more progressive, with CNN calling Target “one of the most outspoken” corporate supporters of DEI. Many of Target’s efforts to promote Black-owned businesses got outsized attention after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which happened just 10 miles from Target’s headquarters in downtown Minneapolis. In 2021, Target pledged to spend $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025. 

Convenience has also driven loyalty over the years, with many shoppers saying they liked frequenting Target because of its one-stop-shop nature and the ease of services like Drive Up. 

Deborah Copperud, a freelance writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, had named her Substack “Deborah Copperud Shops at Target.” But early this year, she renamed it to “Deborah Copperud Volunteers,” coinciding with her decision to stop shopping at Target. As Copperud detailed in a HuffPost article, she spent $6,270 at Target last year through Drive-Up services. But since the end of January, she’s spent nothing at the retailer. 

Copperud described herself as a more liberal person and added that she thought she was “a target customer of Target.” She was disappointed to see it “go back on some of the more progressive policies they had touted since 2020,” she said.

“[My thought process was], ‘Well, I’m gonna spread that around to businesses that are actually more aligned with my values,’” she said.

Copperud, for her part, said she still misses Target. “If Brian Cornell, the CEO, were to issue a public apology, and reinstitute all of those diversity, equity and inclusion measures, that would bring me back,” she said. 

For some customers, it’s been easier to completely cut out Target cold turkey. Pearson, who is based in Georgia, said the Target she used to frequent is located right across the street from a Costco — so, instead of turning right to go to Target, she turns left. 

But others say that while they are cutting back on their Target spending, they haven’t been able to stop entirely, as the hold that a one-stop-shop has is still powerful. Jeter estimated that she previously went to Target three to five times a week; now, she goes about two to three times a month when she needs something that’s hard to find elsewhere, she said, citing travel-sized toiletries as one example.

“Another time, I needed a household item and a grocery item — and so, instead of going to two different stores, because I was kind of in a bind, I did end up going to Target … because I could get everything in one place,” she said. 

Now, picking up everything on her list sometimes requires trips to multiple stores. When Jeter spoke with Modern Retail at the end of July, she was preparing to take her niece back-to-school shopping. “Instead of taking her to Target, which we normally do,” she said the two of them would probably visit a local stationary store, and then go to TJ Maxx or Marshall’s for her clothes and a new backpack, and “make a day out of it.”

But Jeter is also the type of shopper who has been conscientious for a while about spending her money at places that align with her values. She said she hasn’t shopped at Walmart in years, and since Covid, she and her husband will typically do a “Small Business Saturday or Sunday” where they spend one day each weekend shopping at local businesses. She views it as a “fun activity” and said she also found herself spending more when she was “leaning into the conveniences of Target.” 

What the data shows

As Cornell expressed during Target’s most recent earnings call in May, there is a myriad of challenges facing Target right now, from tariffs to declining consumer confidence to increased competition. It’s difficult to figure out which of those is the biggest driving factor convincing more people to shop elsewhere. And looking at a cross-section of sales data, foot traffic demographic information and reputation tracking provide mixed signals. 

Bloomberg, for example, recently wrote that calls to boycott Target “may be resonating with Black shoppers,” as Placer.AI data pulled for Bloomberg found that “the decline in foot traffic for Target locations in Georgia, Mississippi and Maryland, among the U.S. states with the highest share of Black residents, outpaced the national decline by as much as double since the boycott began in March.” 

Caliber, a reputation analytics firm that regularly surveys consumers about how much they like and trust major companies on a seven-point scale, said that Target’s Trust & Like score fell from 70 in January to 63 in July — five points below that of Walmart’s, though the two were tied at the beginning of the year. 

Caliber CEO Shahar Silbershatz said that the firm looked into whether the drop in Target’s Trust & Like score could be connected to its rollback of DEI efforts. He said the firm first looked to see if there were patterns among other U.S. companies, or the retail sector specifically, that may explain why Target’s Trust & Like score declined so much. But, he said, “we didn’t see any general decline in repetitions with U.S. companies, and we didn’t see that in the retail sector.” In fact, other companies that Caliber tracks, like Costco, have seen increases in their Trust & Like scores this year. 

He said Caliber’s data shows that Target’s Trust & Like score dropped five points over a single month among respondents who identify as Democrats, and seven points among independents. 

Silbershatz was careful to note that there’s a “certain margin of error that needs to be taken into consideration.” He said Caliber typically see volatility in Trust & Like scores of “plus or minus three points on a month-to-month basis.” 

Among the 30 Fortune 500 companies that Caliber regularly tracks, Target saw the biggest decline in its Trust & Like score between January and July. Still, Silbershatz was clear to note that the decline “is not a severe crisis” for Target.

“We typically define a severe crisis as a 20% decline in a Customer Like & Trust score,” he said. “But it is a reputational crisis.” 

Thomas Paulson, vp and head of market insights at foot traffic analytics firm Advan Research, meanwhile, said the bigger issue facing Target is that the company is “competing with four behemoths — Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club — that are all on their game right now.”

“These guys are putting up outsized growth,” he said.

In a May blog post, Paulson analyzed Target’s first-quarter earnings and argued that they were better than initially reported because declines in store foot traffic were partially offset by an increase in digital sales. Advan uses historical location data pulled from 40 million devices, and taps a panel of transaction data from 120 million debit and credit cards. Paulson also looked at how store traffic to Target increased or decreased among various types of shoppers in April, using PersonaLive segmentation from the company Spatial AI. 

Paulson found that affluent households were the biggest drivers behind the decline in Target store traffic in April. Visits from what he called “Ultra Wealthy Families,” for example, dropped 5% between April 2024 and April 2025. Visits from “Young Urban Singles,” meanwhile, declined just 2.6%. As a result, Paulson wrote at the time, “We see little evidence that the [DEI] backlash was the driver of the weakness in store traffic.”

In an interview with Modern Retail, Paulson noted that wealthy shoppers are “the people that are most prone to pay for convenience.” And he believes Target has fallen behind other retailers like Walmart when it comes to store delivery, arguing that Walmart has a better grocery offering than Target. 

As Modern Retail has previously reported, Walmart has also done more this year to promote itself to high-income shoppers through dedicated marketing campaigns, promoting its increased online assortment through its third-party marketplace. Target’s third-party marketplace, meanwhile, is much smaller in comparison. 

Regardless of why shoppers may be avoiding Target, ultimately, convenience is one of the key pillars that Target is counting on to win them back. “We like to think of the Tarzhay value as price plus style and ease and convenience,” Cornell said during the company’s last earnings call in May. 

At least for the shoppers who spoke with Modern Retail, the “Tarzhay value” isn’t enough to offset their current dismay at the company’s retreat on DEI. Some of them said they’re more likely to consider competitors before setting foot in a Target again. 

For example, Jackson, who said she’s also boycotting Amazon right now, said that she did renew her Prime membership for one month to buy something she couldn’t find elsewhere. And at this point, she said, she’d rather go to Walmart than Target. 

“Target was intentional with how they interacted and navigated [with] the Black communities, the brown communities, the LGBTQ+ communities. … [To me] when you’re intentional and then you take it back, it means you never cared in the first place.”