Talking Turkey at the TurkeyBlog

Monday, December 20, 2004

Here's Hewitt with the latest on Target.

Very brief thoughts:

1) businesses do have a right to decide how and to whom they will donate.

2) the reflexive hurt feelings and sinister suspicions of the Salvation Army's backers were over the top.

3) if I were running a corporation with multiple good causes asking for support, I'd be ordering extra aspirin and Pepto-Bismol and, worse, be trying to decide whether the best charities to help weren't the ones that practiced social blackmail most effectively. Will we see Operation PUSH kettles next year?

4) though Target was within its rights and the SA backers showed less than Christian attitudes in suspecting and asserting the worst about Target... when you're beat, you're beat. It's time to seek some sort of conciliation.

What's most unfortunate in the whole mess is that conciliation will be difficult. Hugh says:

Only vanity explains the decision to dig in and double down, when an honest admission of error and a change of policy could recover the situation, and get the Salvation Army the support it needs to care for the country's least and lost

But given the way Target was villified, it's natural that the management team would dig in. If you call me Satan's second cousin and accuse me of wanting to starve the poor, I'm likely to get defensive too. Hugh says an honest admission of error would do, but the comment traffic I saw when this hit the front pages wasn't looking for "admission of error," it was looking for blood vengeance against the pagan heathens.

Of future e-mails, Hugh says:

Another e-mail might help, but one that strikes the "more in sorrow than in anger" tone. Send it to guest.relations@target.com, or use the other contact info the corporation provides.

This is what good, open-hearted Christians should have been sending in the first place. Those who reflexively assumed their faith was under assault again showed no more charity than Target has. And they put the CEO in one hell of a bind. Hugh again:

The CEO ought to overrule all the lower-downs who put him into this position and issue a welcome back invitation and work to get the kettles back this year.

In other words, he ought to announce, "I'm a good guy and I'm sorry about the idiots I entrust with the management of different aspects of this company." That makes for real productive staff meetings. Target blew the call in cancelling on the Salvation Army. No question. But a lot of good Christians blew their call in turn, labelling stupid management as the second cousin of the Anti-Christ without looking for either legitimate reasons why their wishes were denied or ways to assume the best about people and provide an opportunity for it to be brought out.

What's sad is this is not, ultimately, about "a pox on both their houses." It's a pox on the homes of those who look to the Salvation Army for help this time of year. Hopefully, by next year the pissing contest between good Christians who know when they're being dissed and Target's oblivious management will have been sufficiently forgotten that Target can quietly recommence working with the SA. But for this year, I'm not optimistic. After the onslaught that followed the first major complaints against Target, any Target executive of good faith has as much reason to be wary of Salvation Army backers as sensitive Christians have to be wary of mega-corporations. Let's hope that next time, 1) the mega-corporations will do a better job feeling out how to approach these things and 2) the good Christians will take a little more interest in saving those who they see as having strayed and a little less interest in drawing blood for their righteous cause.

posted by gbarto at 1:59 AM

Monday, December 20, 2004

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