Come on, Target. Do better.

So I am hanging out on Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace on Wednesday morning, a few minutes after calling out Dick's Sporting Goods ( DKS ) on Instagram for its horrific earnings day this week.

I randomly check the stock price of fellow big box retailer Target ( TGT ), only to find it had an ugly session the day before. It caught my attention because the broader market had hung in there, and I didn't see any analyst downgrades on Target.

I then came across something on Target with the word "backlash" in it.

"What the hell did this company do now?" I muttered to myself.

It wasn't hard to find out. Target apologized this week for selling a kids' circus clown Halloween costume that critics said evoked racist minstrel imagery. The orange-and-black costume, which included gloves, a top hat, and a mask resembling a smiling mouth with large teeth, was removed from the website, but not before consumers took Target to task.

"We removed an offensive Halloween costume that should never have been part of our assortment," Target said in a statement. "It is no longer for sale. As a company, we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. We know this is especially hurtful for our Black guests, team members and partners. Removing the costume is an important first step, and we are looking closely at how this happened and what needs to change to ensure this won't happen again."

The thing is, Target didn't just get this wrong. It has gotten a lot of things wrong over the past few years. Remember the 2023 Pride merchandise backlash ? How about the January 2025 DEI rollback initiatives?

All of this is getting absurd, and investors need to be asking tough questions of management. Frankly, so do the Wall Street analysts who cover Target, because it's weighing on the business and could damage the valuation over time.

Consumers have more power at their fingertips than ever before — they can take to social media to air grievances or shop at other websites to buy stuff — and I think Target's stock falling on this news is evidence of that.

Are Target's internal product audit systems broken? Is some kind of detection software not functioning correctly? Are the hiring processes for corporate employees dysfunctional? Are corporate employees disgruntled because of big layoffs under the new CEO? Are long-tenured employees mailing it in?

What is structurally wrong inside of this retail giant that decisions like these get made time and time again? Whatever the issue, it has to be fixed by the newish executives running the company. We don't see these things happening at Costco ( COST )!