Overview: Economic power and everyday resistance
Contributor Lizzy Nyoike breaks down how everyday Twin Cities shoppers are sustaining the nationwide Target boycott nineteen months after it began. Rather than waiting on corporate promises, community members share how they permanently redirected their spending to local businesses, markets, and competitors, proving that economic accountability doesn't fade with the news cycle.
Nineteen months after Minnesota organizers launched the National Target Boycott, the people sustaining it aren’t civil rights leaders standing at a podium. They’re shoppers who quietly rerouted their spending to Costco, farmers markets and family-owned businesses, and have no plans to go back.
“I believe that boycotting is a major way of speaking and being heard,” said Makeda Norris, who began avoiding Target before the boycott officially started.
Credit: Courtesy
The boycott’s staying power was tested again last week, when Target pulled a children’s Halloween costume that Black shoppers online said evoked racist blackface and minstrel-show imagery. For longtime boycotters, the episode wasn’t a surprise so much as confirmation of why they started boycotting in the first place.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and co-founder of the National Target Boycott, said the incident could not be dismissed as a single bad decision.
“Someone should have recognized how unconscionable and racist that costume was, the fact that it slipped through potentially multiple levels of approval and it took Black women online calling out the costume for the company to actually pull it from their shelves,” she said. “It reinforces exactly why there is a nationwide Target boycott to begin with.”
Corporate promises and community pushback
The National Target Boycott was announced in Minneapolis on Jan. 30, 2025, and began Feb. 1, after Target said it would end several diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, including its Racial Equity Action and Change initiative. Organizers have said Target has not restored those commitments or provided documentation on its pledge, made after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, to spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses.
Community members interviewed for this story said they’ve continued the boycott by changing where they shop, long after the news cycle around it faded.
Norris was raised in Texas by a family involved in the Civil Rights Movement; her father was a civil rights activist, and she grew up hearing relatives discuss the Montgomery bus boycott and remembers them helping with related fundraising. Her mother taught her to avoid businesses that didn’t respect her or her community.
“What I don’t spend with you might not hurt you, but I am not going to help you,” Norris recalled her mother saying.
Norris now shops at more local businesses and farmers markets and goes without some items she once bought regularly at Target. For her, continuing the boycott is about standing up for what she believes in.
“It’s as much a message to myself about pride, self-discipline and respect,” she said.
Examining corporate values from the inside out
Jim Lieberthal’s decision to boycott Target was shaped partly by his 35 years at Ameriprise Financial, where he learned to pay attention to the difference between a company’s public message and its internal decisions. He remembered when Target offered grants and other support to community organizations, which he believed showed the company understood its responsibility to the communities that helped it grow. Over time, he said he watched some of those efforts disappear, and Target’s pullback on DEI further damaged his trust.
“It’s mostly about how they behave towards the community that has me infuriated,” Lieberthal said.
Lieberthal stopped shopping at Target in January 2025. Since then, he has divided his shopping among other retailers, including Costco, and smaller, family-owned businesses, and he researches companies’ policies before deciding where to spend his money. He believes DEI should be part of a company’s everyday decisions, not something it promotes only when convenient.
“It’s not a one and done, you have to think about it all the time,” Lieberthal said.
Nicole Kanieski’s connection to Target goes back decades. She worked for Minneapolis Public Schools for more than 20 years, most of it at Whittier Community School for the Arts, where she said Target employees once worked with staff to plan family events and connect students with resources.
“What you’re seeing now isn’t the Target that I have been a part of for most of my life,” Kanieski said.
Her decision to stop shopping at Target was difficult, since some family members have worked for the company and depend on it. But she said Target’s past support for local communities made its more recent decisions feel personal.
The economic ripple effect
Boycott organizers point to declines in Target’s sales and store traffic, along with a more than $12 billion loss in market valuation, as evidence that sustained consumer pressure has had a significant impact on the company. They also point to the replacement of Target’s CEO, the elimination or non-filling of roughly 1,800 positions, and the company’s absence from Fortune’s Most Admired Companies All-Star list after a 24-year streak as signs of its broader struggles since the boycott began.
For Levy Armstrong, the question of whether the boycott is still active has a simple answer.
“For many, it is a permanent boycott,” she said. “It’s a divorce.”
Lizzy Nyoike is a Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication student and contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. She welcomes reader responses at lnyoike@spokesman-recorder.com.