Target CEO Suggests President Trump is to Blame for Drop in Business

Mega-retailer Target is experiencing a drop off in sales that are being attributed to fewer Hispanics shopping at the company’s stores.

Last week during a conference in Aspen, CO, Target CEO Brian Cornell bemoaned falling profits which he alluded were the fault of President Donald Trump’s tougher stance on illegal immigration.

According to a report in Bloomberg Business, Mr. Cornell specifically singled out locations that were close to the border which in the past have lured Mexicans north to do their shopping.

Keep in mind that this is the same company that was responsible for a huge data breach when the credit card numbers of an estimated 40 million shoppers were stolen by hackers in 2013. While it was before Cornell’s time with the corporation, it certainly didn’t help in terms of branding.

Target also suffered a significant loss of sales when their transgender friendly restroom policy was announced last year and subsequently boycotted by social conservatives.

But as with everything else these days, It’s all Trump’s fault.

Via Bloomberg “Target CEO Warns That Hispanics May Be Shopping Less”:

Target Corp. Chief Executive Officer Brian Cornell is sounding alarm bells over the state of Hispanic shoppers in the U.S. — a key growth demographic for many retailers and consumer brands.

“The Hispanic consumer in the U.S. is shopping much less,” Cornell said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech event Tuesday in Aspen, Colorado. “They are staying home. They are going out less often.”

Cornell didn’t mention President Donald Trump by name, but he talked about a shift in behavior this year and mentioned “border towns” — where retailers for years have depended on shoppers from northern Mexico for higher revenue. Trump took office in January after promising to crack down on undocumented immigration, especially from Mexico. Purchases by Hispanics at U.S. retailers in categories tracked by researcher NPD Group have fallen 8 percent this year.

“There’s clearly been a pullback” since Trump was elected, said Marshal Cohen, an analyst at NPD. “There’s concern about going out in an environment where you could be deported.”

While the bean counters are always only concerned with money without any thought to the long term social costs, it would make sense if there were fewer Hispanic shoppers.

But how many of them can actually be attributed to Trump’s immigration policies and how many were turned off by the tranny bathrooms and chose to make a statement with their money? It’s not as if homosexuality is glorified in the Hispanic culture like it is in America.

Many may simply prefer Walmart which is cheaper and carries a considerably larger product selection than Target.

It’s a pretty lame excuse to lay the blame at Trump’s feet but that is an all too frequent one these days.