Boycotting Target? To truly target the chain, try a go-back campaign

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If you want to persuade Target to reinstate its DEI programs, don’t hold your breath that the 40-day boycott that started on Wednesday will instantly change its policies. Excluding a small few that are highly thought-out and organized, boycotts often don’t work.

But a go-back campaign would certainly get their attention.

That may sound like a catchy phrase for encouraging the Minnesota-based retailer to reinstate diversity commitments made after the murder of George Floyd, but that’s not what I mean. For the definition, ask any Target worker.

“We probably had 35 carts of gobacks. Wonder what’s the record for the most?” a worker posted recently on a subreddit group for Target employees (not affiliated or endorsed by the chain).

A TikTok video from last month illustrates the problem more graphically, showing a line of 23 shopping carts overflowing with items waiting to be reshelved.

How does this translate into a DEI protest? Well, someone has to do all that reshelving, which takes hours, directly eating away at the store’s profits. Any number of shoppers abandon their carts mid-aisle and leave. Some may have innocently left their wallet or Red Card at home. Others may be rushing a misbehaving child outside. And some people are just jerks.

Go-backs are a problem on a normal day. So imagine that hundreds of shoppers did it as part of an organized action, for days on end.

The idea stems from nonviolent direct action used by civil rights pioneers like the late Jim Farmer and George Houser, co-founders of the Congress of Racial Equality.

Their strategies for integrating restaurants that wouldn’t serve Black people included having an interracial pair request service, and being denied. Later, a lone white protester would enter and be seated, with a Black friend joining him once he was served. The activists experimented with various combinations of diners of different races, often leaving the restaurant staff unsure who were protesters and who were just customers looking for a meal.

I learned these tactics firsthand from Farmer and Houser when I produced the PBS documentary “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!” The film chronicled the first Freedom Ride, in 1947, which used similar strategies. So did the Montgomery Bus Boycott eight years later.

That boycott has inspired copycats ever since, such as the don’t-buy-anything (except local) Economic Blackout on Feb. 28. But today’s would-be leaders display little of the planning used in Montgomery, which depended on all of that city’s African Americans staying off the buses for more than a year, in the face of very real violence. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s house was bombed with his wife and 7-week-old daughter inside, by luck escaping injury. Have today’s leaders prepared protesters for anywhere near that kind of sacrifice?

Also back then, Montgomery’s buses were run by a private company that greatly needed the fares, and Black people made up 70% of the ridership. That’s in stark contrast to last week’s Economic Blackout, which communicated no tangible economic goals before it was blown off the news cycle by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s ill-fated visit to the Oval Office.

“Boycotts are successful to the extent that they have a clear target and a clear demand,” said Joel Sipress, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Superior and former Duluth City Council member. “The Montgomery Bus Boycott epitomized those characteristics.”

But other campaigns aren’t so coordinated, he said.

“In the 1980s, there was a strike against Hormel in southern Minnesota, and there was a nationwide boycott of Hormel. But that strike was not successful and eventually, that boycott kind of dissolved as the strike itself dissolved due to other circumstances.”

As for targeting Target, Sipress says a move by LGBTQ pride festivals in the Twin Cities and the Twin Ports to cut ties with Target succeeded in garnering media attention. But, he added: “If you really want to have an impact on Target’s employment and corporate practices, you need to do things that over time will actually affect their bottom line.”

That’s when I shared with him the go-back idea, which Sipress immediately linked to the civil rights pioneers who inspired me.

“What you’re describing is almost like the retail equivalent of a sit-in,” he said. “It would need to involve a large number of people, coordinated at a national level. But with mass participation, if it could be sustained over a period of time, it could be the kind of action that could disrupt their day-to-day business.”

Though neither of us are lawyers, Sipress said there’s no law forcing you to buy anything in a store, and you could always buy a candy bar on your way out. But am I encouraging shopping-cart chaos by putting this out publicly?

Probably no more than go-backs are causing already. My point is that leaders of boycotts or any other actions need to give serious thought to what actually works before asking millions to follow them, and campaigns need to be constantly reassessed and adjusted while they’re going on.

And — holding true to journalistic impartiality — I’ve also just told Target via this column what they might expect, meaning they may want to check that their cameras are working (though at what point would they approach a cart-abandoner? Maybe Mrs. McGillicuddy really needed to visit the ladies room).

In alerting Target, I’m again following my mentors. One of Farmer’s precepts was to inform your adversaries of the impending action rather than just surprising them.

Beyond all that, there’s a simpler way for Target to avoid boycotts, go-backs and any other actions:

Cut out all this anti-DEI nonsense, and go back to respecting all people, who happen to be your customers.

Robin Washington is a producer-host for Wisconsin Public Radio and a former editor-in-chief of the Duluth News Tribune. He lives in Duluth and St. Paul and can be reached at robin@robinwashington.com.