In March 2025, popular posts circulating on social media claimed that retail giant Target lost 5 million shoppers after rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures, while rival Costco gained 7.7 million.
(Facebook user Progressive Christians)
One Facebook post read:
In the past four weeks, Costco, which has embraced DEI initiatives, GAINED 7 million shoppers. Target, which got rid of DEI, LOST 5 million shoppers. That's the power we have as consumers.
Similar posts also circulated on X (archived), Instagram (archived), Bluesky (archived) and Reddit (archived).
The claim appeared to have come from a Business Insider article that in turn referenced a report by the consumer analytics firm Numerator.
Graphs from the report showed that in the four weeks ending on Feb. 9, 2025, Target's store traffic had dropped by 4.9 million and Costco's had risen by 7.68 million, compared with the same period in 2024. According to Business Insider, the Numerator report counted store visits rather than individual shoppers.
Numerator confirmed that its report counted store visits, rather than individual shoppers. Bob Richter, Numerator's publicist, said: "These projections are based on verified purchase trips captured through Numerator's Total Commerce panel and balanced to total U.S. census figures."
We also reached out to Target to ask whether Numerator's findings aligned with the company's own data.
Target has been dogged by rumors that a DEI rollback in January 2025 caused financial damage to the business as it was singled out for boycott plans following the announcement.
Meanwhile, also in January 2025, shareholders at Costco voted down a proposal to report on the potential risks of the company's DEI efforts. Costco's DEI policies remained unchanged since the start of the second Trump administration.
Black, Hispanic shoppers drove Numerator's claim
Numerator released its report, titled, "The Impact of DEI Cuts on Retail," on March 5. The report collated data about Target, Costco and Walmart to reach the conclusion that Black and Hispanic customers were "reducing visits at disproportionately high rates in the weeks following Target's DEI rollback," while Costco had "attracted many of these same consumers" at its stores.
In a graph, titled, "Hispanic & Black households are contributing more than fair share to Target's traffic decline," Numerator said that Target's traffic had fallen by 4.9 million visits in the four weeks ending on Feb. 9, 2025, compared with the same period in 2024. Hispanic/Latino shoppers accounted for 30% of the lost traffic, while Black shoppers accounted for 20%.
(Numerator's "The Impact of DEI Cuts on Retail" report)
Another graph, titled, "Hispanic households fuel Costco's growth at nearly twice their demographic share" showed that Costco's traffic rose by 7.68 million visits in the four weeks ending on Feb. 9, 2025, compared with the same period in 2024. Hispanic/Latino shoppers accounted for 37% of the traffic gained, while Black shoppers accounted for 11%.
(Numerator's "The Impact of DEI Cuts on Retail" report)
On March 4, Target reported its fourth-quarter and fiscal year 2024 earnings. Though the quarter ended in December 2024, the report also included comments on the first quarter of 2025 so far.
Target said it had seen "a small decline in February Net Sales" and a "soft" performance in February generally, despite record sales around Valentine's Day. The company attributed the "soft" February to "declining consumer confidence" and "uncharacteristically cold weather across the U.S." that affected clothes sales. The earnings report did not mention DEI.
According to Placer.ai, another company that provided shopper data, visits to Target stores had fallen every week since its Jan. 24 DEI announcement, compared with the same weeks in 2024. The traffic dip continued into March.
By comparison, Costco gained between 4.4% and 7% more visits per week from Jan. 27 to March 16 compared with the same period the year before.
Placer.ai said company uses "a panel of tens of millions of devices and utilizes machine learning to make estimations for visits to locations across the country."
The company's data visualizations, presented by Bloomberg and seen by Snopes, showed the traffic data in percentages rather than, for example, thousands or millions of visits, meaning it was not directly comparable to Numerator's.
Numerator's basic premise — that Target lost shoppers and Costco gained them following Target's Jan. 24 announcement — appeared to be supported by Placer.ai's data. Placer.ai did not comment on what caused the traffic changes.
In a further attempt to verify Numerator and Bloomberg's claim about visits lost and gained, we also reached out to Unacast and Safegraph, two other consumer analytics firms, to see if their data corroborated Numerator's. We will update this report with any replies.
We previously debunked a false rumor that Target had lost $15.7 billion in market value since ending its DEI measures in January 2025.