Claim Boycott Has Negatively Impacted Stock Price Proven False
Costa Mesa, California will play host to Target’s Annual Meeting of Shareholders next week, and the American Family Association will be waiting for them. According to Pink News, the AFA, a well known and widely reviled anti-LGBT hate group, will be crashing the meeting of investors in order to voice their concerns over Target’s recent announcement that they will offer bathroom facilities to transgender individuals in accordance with their gender identity.
Calling the policy “a danger to wives and mothers,” the group has launched an online boycott of the department store giant, collecting some 1.3 million signatures. “As a proxy attendee, your AFA will personally address the Board of Directors and thousands of shareholders on behalf of 1.3 million people who have signed the pledge to boycott Target stores until the company makes the safety of women and children a priority,” AFA President Tim Wildmon said in a statement.
The AFA has claimed that the boycott has cost the company $10 billion, pointing to a recent 18 percent drop in Target’s stock price since the group announced their boycott on April 20. Noting that “correlation is not causation,” Snopes and others have discounted this claim, saying that “the drop in stock price Target experienced post-bathroom was not unusually large: in mid-May 2016, their stock price was the same as it had been three months earlier.” Reason’s Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie also wrote last month that the claim the boycott has negatively impacted target’s stock was false.
Target has given no indication that they would consider reversing the policy, and according to Target CEO Brian Cornell the boycott has “not seen a material or measurable impact on our business. Just a handful of stores across the country have seen some activity and have been impacted.”