Target, Like Bud Light, Faces the Power of the Consumer

Commentary

The Bud Light boycott, inspired by the brand’s preposterous political messaging, has certainly tarnished the beer and sent a powerful message to the corporate class. The message is that the nonsense must stop now else consumers will remind these companies who is really in charge.

If consumers stop forking over for a product and trading with a company, it’s not long for this world. Bud Light as a brand might never recover. Among the winners are local breweries. That is how it should be.

This is all about the sovereignty of consumers, an essential pillar of capitalism. A significant segment of the consuming public is waking up to its power.

Now a much more formidable corporate power has been hit: Target. It had a hard-earned reputation for selling quality products at much lower prices. But thanks to some eggheaded managers in its marketing department, it too stepped right into the woke muck.

In the lead-up to “Pride” month, it put on display a clothing line for trans people, as if that is some large market segment it needed to capture. Among the items in that section were clothing in kids sizes that are labeled “tuck friendly.”

Gross. Evil even.

Once the news got out, consumers reacted and stopped forking over their hard-earned cash. Pundits on the mainstream left are blaming conservative influencers but this is a classic case of shooting the messenger. The problem is the company itself.

CEO Brian Cornell seriously misread the moment and came to the defense of the displays and products, saying that they are “the right thing for society.” That inflamed public anger even more and intensified the boycott.

Following that misstep, and a tanking stock price, the company announced that it was taking down the displays. This provoked the ever-predictable Governor Gavin Newsom of California to tweet that Target was “selling out the LGBTQ+ community to extremists,” leading to a further boycott from the left.

In the midst of this, word got out that Target had partnered with Abprallen, a pro-Satan brand based in London. It didn’t take long for people to discover the company’s influencers pushing out pro-devil propaganda on social media.

National Review reports on one of the company’s designers Instagram postings from a “gay trans man” named Erik. Apparently, Target knew full well of the company’s occult penchants when it made the contract. “When I was approached to create products for Target they told me that my work such as ‘Satan Respects Pronouns’ wouldn’t be a good fit,” Erik wrote. They “wanted my collection for adults to be a bit less gothic.”

Oh, so Target encouraged the Satanist to dial it back a bit so as not to rile up the masses. It didn’t work. People are not idiots, as it turns out.

In the midst of this disaster, Target’s stock lost $9 billion in valuation. In a short time, the stock has fallen dramatically from $160 to $138, and the downward pressure continues to mount. It is starting to look like another corporate disaster unfolding before our eyes. Maybe that is why Target is flooding your in-box with 30 percent off discounts.

The public has started to learn an important lesson from its new interest in corporate management. The lesson is that when there is smoke, there is fire.

All these causes are connected: trans promotion, social-justice virtue signaling, climate-change alarmism, blather about sustainability, and techno-leftist politics in general, not to mention outright Satanism. It’s all part of the creepy push by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for owning nothing and being happy.

And sure enough, it’s not hard to find all these signs on Target’s own corporate blog. Its Target Zero campaign is full of all the usual flexes that have nothing to do with making good products at good prices available to the consumer.

“Minimizing our energy use and investing in projects around the country that produce electricity through renewable sources — like sun and wind — are just two powerful ways we are reducing our footprint,” the company says, “as we commit to sourcing 100 percent of Target’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030. This goal applies to our stores, supply chain facilities and offices across the U.S. One way we’re doing this is through our long-term agreement with Plenitude, Eni’s Benefit Corporation (Società Benefit) to purchase green electricity from the Golden Buckle Solar Project …”

Oh, and they will soon be telling you that you have to bring your own bag! “We have a goal to create sustainable alternatives to single-use plastic bags. This spring we’re testing new Bring Your Own Bag and Borrow a Bag initiatives in different markets, building on other pilot programs implemented last year.”

You get the idea here. We are all too familiar with this corporate prattle, all designed to boost the ESG/DEI score. After 15 years of zero interest rate subsidies, plus lockdowns, these companies went wild in hiring and also fully immersing themselves in woke ideology that has nothing to do with freedom or capitalism.

Target is one of those stores that thrived during lockdowns while small businesses were closed by governments across the country. They were declared “essential.” That should have been enough of a signal about what was really going on here. Like so many other corporations, this is a company steeped in ruling class corruption. They are part of a cabal that wants to radically change life on earth. Part of that involves the promotion of gender fluidity and marketing that ideology to kids. Most large companies are involved, reports The Epoch Times.

I certainly hadn’t realized it at the time but it is easy to see now. Lockdowns were an experiment not only in human separation and government control but also corporate cartelization. It was an aggressive display for the whole country that we only need these big corporations to serve our needs. Local business is dispensable.

Target was declared essential. Local mom-and-pops were deemed unessential.

That’s a creepy but highly realistic interpretation. Of course Target happily participated in the mass vaccination program. It offered employees four hours of paid time off for every shot and even reimbursed travel for those employees who took rideshares to vaccination appointments.

Smaller companies could not afford such generosity, which gives you a clue as to why these large companies were perfectly fine with the vaccine mandates.

Think back on the history of totalitarian experiments. In Soviet Russia, all products were delivered by nationalized producers and distributors. They had one brand of coffee, one brand of canned fish, one brand of tea, and so on. This was all in the name of eliminating “waste,” exactly as Target’s corporate communication says.

And in totalitarian Nazi Germany, economic life was governed entirely by privately held but government-controlled corporate cartels. The system was called corporatism or fascism. It is not capitalism but a socialism with German, Italian, French, and Spanish characteristics.

After the war, German finance minister Ludwig Erhard set out to reform the whole system with currency reforms and a re-introduction of the free market that led to the German “economic miracle.” The most formidable opposition he faced immediately was not from the government bureaucrats but from the corporate elite.

Erhard’s 1958 book “Prosperity Through Competition” is a classic argument against corporate cartels and for free-market competition. It needs a revisit today. In words that could describe U.S. lockdowns and corporate domination today, he wrote:

“The old hierarchy was marked on the one hand by a thin upper crust able to afford anything, and on the other by a broad lower stratum with insufficient purchasing power. The reshaping of our economic order had to work towards two things: to bring to an end this division, which hampered progressive development, and to end with it ill-feeling between rich and poor.”

He succeeded beautifully. His decentralization of industry created the fastest-growing economy in the world. In the 21st century, however, we are seeing terrifying attempts to recreate Soviet/Nazi economic systems. Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are part of that. That would allow your money to be targeted for use for only intended purposes and turned off if you attempt to defy the cartel.

CBDCs would make these kinds of corporate boycotts impossible. Indeed, that’s the whole point.

Consumers should use their power so long as they have it. The point is to send a message to these oligarchs that they are not in charge. In a free market, the consumer is king. This is the path to widespread prosperity. The “thin upper crust” as represented by Target is getting that message good and hard right now.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.