Target CEO Brian Cornell says shoppers are pulling back, even on groceries, as they feel stressed about their budgets.
In an interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick that aired Thursday morning, he emphasized that the retailer has posted seven consecutive quarters of declining sales of discretionary items, such as apparel and toys, in terms of both dollars and units.
“But even in food and beverage categories, over the last few quarters, the units, the number of items they’re buying, has been declining,” he said in the interview.
I mean, do you think there are obvious actions that management has done that have caused it? Target’s margins are about 3%, so they’re not exactly extorting consumers for their own profit. It’s a grocery store. It’s not a particularly complicated business. Consumer grocery spending probably is more related to the general consumer economic environment than anything that Target does or doesn’t do.
I mean, I think anyone making decisions at a multi billion dollar corporation that they themselves are pocketing millions of that money instead of letting it be reinvested in the business and workers, should be fully to blame for their companies tanking profits.
Executive salaries are a pretty small portion of business expenses. As per Target’s 2022 data, their selling, general, and admin expenses were about 19.76 billion dollars. Of that, the CEO’s pay was $17.7 million, or 0.09%, and actually decreased from the year before. Sure, it’s a lot of money, but it’s pretty average for Fortune 500 CEOs, and nullifying his pay would make essentially no difference. If you were to slash his pay to 0, you could give everyone else an annual raise of $40, representing an hourly raise of about two cents.