Target’s foot traffic fell 9% in February 2025, 6.5% in March and 3.3% in April, on Placer.ai figures reported by Fortune. Each month’s injury was smaller than the one before it. Backlash has a decay rate, and anything with a decay rate belongs to the planners rather than the press office.

The year is duller still. Target closed fiscal 2025 with net sales down 1.7% to $104.8 billion and comparable sales down 2.5%, and the boycott was only one claim on that figure. Twelve months of a church-led campaign against a hundred-billion-dollar retailer moved the top line by less than two points. Weather does more.

Then the curve turned. Weekly visits from 2 February to 22 March 2026 ran 6.6% to 10.3% ahead of the year before, by the same firm’s count. The comparison flatters, since the year before was the trough. The timing is the useful part: the return was under way while the campaign was still running.

The shoppers came back before the boycott was called off.

The shape repeats well enough to be described. Something lands; the objection organises; the first month takes the deepest cut and each month after takes less; the return is quiet and arrives before anyone announces it. What differs between episodes is the volume, not the curve.

None of this is peculiar to Target. A University of Iowa study tracked foot traffic and card spending at more than 500 companies following negative environmental, social and governance news between 2018 and 2020, as summarised by researchers at Tippie. Affected stores often lost fewer than one visit a day, and in almost every case traffic returned to normal within six weeks.

The same study names Target itself as the exception; after the 2023 Pride-collection boycott, its traffic never fully recovered. That was a different fight over different merchandise, but it is a useful caution against treating recovery as guaranteed rather than likely.

American Eagle ran the experiment in apparel. Its Sydney Sweeney denim campaign turned into a national argument. The quarter containing it closed on 2 August with revenue of $1.283 billion, down one per cent, and comparable sales down one per cent. By September the chairman was crediting the Sydney Sweeney and Travis Kelce campaigns with an uptick in customer awareness, engagement and comparable sales. An ordinary quarter had spent a fortnight wearing an extraordinary news cycle.

The advice industry reads the cycle correctly and prescribes backwards. Target’s beauty assortment drew criticism this year for its near-absence of Black-owned brands, coverage that arrived days after the retailer pulled a children’s Halloween costume over complaints that it echoed minstrel caricature. The consultants quoted alongside that story prescribed the usual remedy for the wider messaging gap: address it directly, address it now, before speculation writes the narrative for you. Good counsel about reputation. Demand keeps a different clock, and nobody in the building is paid to read it.

Which makes this an operating failure rather than a moral one. A brand that knows the shape of the curve can budget for it. Promotional cover sized to the trough; media weight held back for the week the customer returns. Instead the money goes to the statement, drafted at speed by people who will be surprised again next quarter. Every brand keeps a team ready to apologise. None keeps one ready for week seven, when she comes back and finds the shelf exactly as she left it.