The Target Boycott Dilemma: Where to Shop Now?

The news that Target donated $150,000 to a group supporting an anti-gay Minnesota gubernatorial candidate presents a conundrum.

Growing up in the Midwest, one of the highlights of the Sunday newspaper was the Target circular: What's on sale this week? When my stepdaughter moved to Grand Junction, Colo., for a time a few years ago, her first complaint was this: "There's only one Target." Even jaded Manhattanites are reveling in the opening of their first Target store in East Harlem.

There's something about the tidy, bright aisles of clothing, cosmetics, kitchenware, household goods -- well, everything -- at Target that just makes shopping there more aesthetic than, say, at Kmart or Walmart.

But now MoveOn and other groups are calling for a boycott of the chain. (Best Buy, which donated $100,000 to the Minnesota cause, is also targeted, so to speak.)

So what's a person sympathetic to gay rights to do? Or, put another way, I need vitamins, toothpaste and maybe a new office desk. Should I go to Target before the crush of college students hits my Boulder, Colo., store later this month? (Our store ends up as No. 1 or No. 2 in sales for the chain the week students return.)

Boycotts certainly aren't new. My mom had a list of Nestle products our family was prohibited from buying back in the late 1970s because of that company's baby formula policy in poor countries. I once made the mistake of offering Coors beer to a friend of my dad's who was still boycotting the company because of its anti-union position. Some conservative Christians boycott Disney because of perceived pro-gay policies and its annual "Gay Days" event at the Orlando theme parks.

There are websites with entire lists of companies to boycott on both the liberal and conservative sides of the aisles.

Lawrence Glickman, a history professor at the University of South Carolina and author of "Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America," says boycotts are effective at either a local level, where a company's concentrated consumer base is activated, or when a national boycott gains enough steam to create bad publicity and prompt change.

"Probably the most effective boycott along these lines was the United Farm Workers boycott of grapes in the 1970s and early into the 1980s," Glickman says. "The effect was really to raise consciousness about migrant farm labor and working conditions."

Less effective was last year's Whole Foods boycott after CEO John Mackey attacked health-care reform in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

"Liberal shoppers at Whole Foods were upset by this," Glickman said. "Then there were a lot of people who said 'I'm a Libertarian; I'm going to start buying at Whole Foods.' The net result was not much harm to the bottom line" of the chain.

Then there's the question of weighing the $150,000 donation by Target against the company's other actions. As Target Chairman Gregg Steinhafel pointed out in a message to employees last week, the company provides domestic-partner benefits, sponsors Twin Cities Pride and the Out & Equal Workplace Summit.

"Let me be very clear, Target's support of the GLBT community is unwavering, and inclusiveness remains a core value of our company," Steinhafel wrote.

I'd ask how we can ever tell whether the products we're buying and the companies we buy them from fit within our ethical boundaries.

"That's the age-old question for consumer activists," Glickman says. "We live in a complicated, interconnected globalized world. There's a lot of distance between us and the side of production."

"One of the reasons boycotting and consumer activism [are] so popular is it's an effort for us to insert some ethics in these transactions that are somewhat invisible. Where you draw the line, it really depends."

The question won't go away, and it will go beyond Target and Best Buy.

The January Supreme Court ruling allowing unfettered spending by corporations in elections means other companies could face similar consumer backlash as they take sides in contentious races.

Meanwhile, I need to go shopping. And for now, I guess I'll head to the locally owned grocery up the street, perhaps with a stop at the locally owned hardware store -- because they, too, have virtually everything at their stores.