Target saw foot traffic fall for the eighth consecutive week, extending a losing streak that began just a few days after the company announced it would end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program in late January.

For the week that began March 17, foot traffic fell 5.7% YoY for Target, according to data from Placer.ai. That’s compared to the 7.1% it fell last week, and an average weekly decline over the last eight weeks of 6.2%.

In a March 4 earnings call, when it reported a 3.1% Q4 loss and a non-specified sales decline in February, Target executives were bullish about its Easter assortment boosting business. But if it has so far, it’s not reflected in the foot-traffic data. What may have taken the spring out of the Easter Bunny’s hop for Target is a 40-plus day boycott coinciding with Lent (so ending on Easter) spearheaded by Black clergy for which more than 150,000 have signed up, exceeding organizers’ stated goal of 100,000.

Target did not respond to a request for comment from Retail Brew about the traffic slump.

At Costco, which unlike Target resisted demands from the Trump administration for private companies to dump their DEI programs, foot traffic has continued to grow. For the same week beginning March 17, traffic rose 5.2% YoY, and marked its 13th straight week of gains over last year.

Donald J. slump: While Target is just one of many companies to capitulate to Trump and get rid of DEI, it may be seeing more of a backlash because of how much it championed racial justice and social justice by name in recent years—before eschewing the terms.

In fact, like Target, Walmart had been on a seven-week traffic decline and McDonald’s on an eight-week decline, but both broke the slump in the week beginning March 17, with Walmart inching into positive territory with a 0.3% YoY traffic gain and Mickey D’s with a 2% gain.

Compared to Target’s average YoY loss of 6.2% over the last eight weeks, Walmart’s average weekly traffic was down 1.6% and McDonald’s was down 3.6%.

Circle back: As consistent as Target’s foot-traffic losses have become, we’re in the midst of Target Circle Week, a mammoth sale and marketing push that began on March 23 and lasts through March 29. It does not coincide with a Circle Week last year, but rather a week which in 2024 was itself down 0.8% compared to 2023.

It’s hard to fathom Target not improving over that when we revisit foot traffic in a week, but we’ll try to suss out an apples-and-apples comparison of how this Circle Week compares to prior ones traffic-wise.

This report was written by Andrew Adam Newman and was originally published by Retail Brew.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Good morning! Marine Le Pen was barred from running for office, Columbia University has a new president (again), and we have the latest from one of the most powerful women in Europe.

– At the top. Last year, Ana Botín ranked No. 15 on Fortune’s annual ranking of the world’s Most Powerful Women in Business. The Banco Santander executive chair is the fourth member of her family to lead the legacy Spanish bank and has held her position for a decade. She remains one of the most influential women in Europe—and Santander has been on an upswing, ranked No. 10 on the Fortune 500 Europe. My colleague Prarthana Prakash has a new interview with Botín in the most recent magazine issue of Fortune.

Botín chats with Prarthana about her daily routine, business trends, and the challenges facing European business. European business leaders have a real “productivity gap” with the U.S., Botín acknowledges. “We have to be honest with society about the scale of the challenge and the urgency of the need for change,” she says. “We must do much more to embrace innovation and enterprise, creating a business environment and culture that rewards smart risk-taking.” She advocates for reducing “regulatory and supervisory complexity” and creating a new “social compact” between business and society.

Santander has more than 170 million customers around the world and earned €12.6 billion in profits last year. After a challenging period, higher interest rates, a focus on digital banking, and strong investment banking performance in the U.S. have started to pay off. Those are some striking achievements for one of the few women to lead a major global bank.

Read the full interview here.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• The Department of Government Efficiency may end after only 130 days, well before its original schedule, as Musk’s work at DOGE has become increasingly unpopular among some of the president’s constituents. “There will be a point at which the secretaries will be able to do this work and do it, as we say, with a scalpel,” Trump told reporters on Monday.

President Donald Trump may already be looking to pull the plug on Elon Musk’s controversial DOGE project just two months into his administration. 

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Trump suggested his cabinet secretaries already have learned everything from the Tesla CEO they needed to boost efficiency.

Soon they would be in a position to remove the training wheels and steer their departments without the input from Musk, whose work at DOGE has become increasingly unpopular among some of the president’s constituents.

The president has had to defend DOGE cuts affecting voters in some Republican strongholds while simultaneously lobbying for steep tariff hikes—proposals that have dragged the stock market into the red and fueled recession fears.

Trump recently voiced some displeasure with Musk, demanding the Tesla CEO adopt a more surgical approach rather than wield a chainsaw, as he did onstage with fellow cost-cutter Argentine President Javier Milei.

“A lot of the people that are working with DOGE are the secretaries—you know, the heads of the various agencies—and they’ve learned a lot,” Trump said during a briefing in the Oval Office, adding some of his cabinet staff may try to retain a few of the leftover DOGE personnel advising them.

“There will be a point at which the secretaries will be able to do this work and do it, as we say, with a scalpel.”

Radically shrinking the government was the new ‘Manhattan Project’ for Republicans

The remarks came in response to a question about what may happen to DOGE once Musk’s term of service ends.

The world’s richest man is currently classified as a Special Government Employee and is limited to working no longer than 130 days out of the entire year; this distinction is important because SGEs benefit from laxer ethics and compliance rules than regular government employees. 

If Trump uses Musk’s impending departure to pull the plug on DOGE entirely, it would bring the project to an end long before the envisioned cut-off date on July 4, 2026, when the country celebrates its 250th Independence Day—just before the 2026 mid-term election campaigning begins in earnest.

In November, Trump dubbed DOGE as nothing less than the “Manhattan Project of our time” when he first confirmed that Musk would join his administration to run the unofficial body named after the ticker symbol of Musk’s favorite crypto meme coin. 

“Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of DOGE for a very long time,” Trump wrote of the effort to radically shrink the size of the federal government, initially by $2 trillion and later scaled down to $1 trillion.

Musk claims he’s on target to achieve $1 trillion in savings

Even before he assumed his role, Musk gave a sense of the pain to come when he penned a column in which he called for “mass headcount reductions” to the two million-strong federal workforce. 

Many of the savings in waste and fraud he’s claimed to have unearthed have been disputed or debunked, including the famous example of a $50 million payment to send condoms to Hamas terrorists. 

But it was his claim that the Social Security entitlement program—people’s retirement funds—was the “biggest ponzi scheme of all time” that appeared to most worry Americans.

In an effort to drum up support for their efforts, Musk appeared on Fox News with seven other senior assistants at DOGE last Thursday to dispute the wrecking ball-style characterization of their cuts.

“I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dolllars worth in that time frame,” Musk said, asked about his 130-day term of office. “Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week—and so far we are succeeding.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com