There’s a version of today’s Target earnings report that reads as a comeback story. Net sales up 6.7%. Same-store sales up 5.6% — the first positive comp in five consecutive quarters. Earnings per share of $1.71, beating analyst expectations by nearly 27%. Traffic up across stores and digital. Full-year guidance raised. CEO Michael Fiddelke called it “encouraging early signs that our clarified strategy is resonating.” On paper, Target is back.
The question the earnings call didn’t answer is: back for whom?
The growth driving Target‘s recovery isn’t coming from winning customers back. It’s coming from infrastructure. Target Circle 360 membership revenue, Roundel — Target‘s retail advertising platform — and the Target+ marketplace together drove non-merchandise sales up nearly 25%. Digital comparable sales grew 8.9%. Same-day delivery surged 27%. These are real, durable business lines. They are also the same revenue streams Amazon and Walmart have been building for years — and they don’t require cultural affinity to generate revenue. They require convenience and scale. Target has both.
What Target also has is a trust gap it has never fully accounted for publicly.
In early 2025, Target rolled back its DEI initiatives — ending supplier diversity programs, stepping back from LGBTQ+visibility commitments, and restructuring internal equity goals. The backlash was immediate and sustained. The Target Fast boycott organized quickly across Black, Latino, LGBTQ+, and progressive consumer communities. Target fell out of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies top 50 for the first time since 2001. Its score in the 3BL Media 100 Best Corporate Citizens ranking dropped from 34th to 71st. Brand analytics firm Caliber found 11% fewer consumers said they would recommend Target to others in the months following the rollback. The American Federation of Teachers, representing 1.8 million members, passed a formal boycott resolution in March 2026 over Target‘s response to ICE activity in Minneapolis.
CEO Fiddelke acknowledged earlier this year that Target had ongoing conversations with boycott organizers, who had “acknowledged the meaningful contributions Target has made.” The Target Fast boycott officially ended. The trust gap with the communities that drove Target‘s cultural identity for years is harder to measure — and conspicuously absent from today’s earnings call.
That absence matters. The retail turnaround playbook in 2026 runs through memberships, marketplaces, and advertising ecosystems. That model is financially sound. What it doesn’t require is the kind of consumer loyalty built on cultural alignment — the loyalty that brought people to Target on a Tuesday afternoon not because it was convenient but because it felt like their store. The people who drove that energy are not visibly in today’s numbers. They may have simply stopped being necessary to the model.
Target didn’t win its customers back. It built a business model that needs fewer of them. One good quarter makes that easier not to notice. Several more will make it easier to forget entirely. The question is whether that’s a recovery — or a repositioning dressed as one.