Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

More companies back away from Donald Trump under pressure from customers

By James Hohmann February 3 at 10:20 AM

THE BIG IDEA: Companies are caught between a rock and a hard place, with President Trump on one side and their customers on the other.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick quit President Trump’s 15-member council of business leaders yesterday, and Disney CEO Bob Iger let it be known that he won’t attend a meeting at the White House today because of a scheduling conflict.

Nordstrom announced last night that it will stop selling Ivanka Trump’s name-branded line of clothing and shoes after an extended boycott by an anti-Trump activist group called “Grab Your Wallet."

The retailer said the first daughter’s products are being dropped because of poor sales. In early December, Nordstrom had 71 Ivanka items for sale on its web site. Right now, just four are left. And they’re all being sold at a clearance discount.

We’ve obviously written a lot about companies bending to pressure from Trump, especially defense contractors like United Technologies, Boeing and Lockheed. But firms that depend on retail sales will perhaps care more about pressure from their customers than from White House heavies.

Customers complained so loudly after Kawasaki USA – a distributor of motorcycle, ATVs and personal watercraft – sponsored an episode of “The Celebrity Apprentice” that the company said it will not sponsor the show again, so long as the president is credited as an executive producer.

The “Grab Your Wallet” campaign has targeted more than 60 companies, including Trump’s golf courses and hotels, those that sell Trump-branded goods and other businesses whose leaders endorsed Trump or donated to his campaign. “The people who voted against Donald Trump may have lost at the ballot box, but they can win at the cash register,” Shannon Coulter, who helps lead the effort, told David Fahrenthold and Sarah Halzack.

“Grab Your Wallet” has taken five companies off its boycott list since November, after they stopped selling Ivanka merchandise: Shoes.com, Bellacor, Wayfair, Zulily and RueLaLa.

Another retailer that distanced itself from Trump is L.L. Bean. The maker of outdoor apparel and footwear became a boycott target last month after news reports that heiress Linda Bean gave $55,000 more than legally allowed to a PAC set up to help the president win Maine. In response, Trump urged his Twitter followers to shop there. That prompted the executive chairman of the company to put out a statement distancing L.L. Bean from Mrs. Bean and insisting that the business was totally apolitical. “We fully acknowledge and respect that some may disagree with the political views of a single member of our 10-person board of directors,” Shawn Gorman wrote.

[...]

-- The pressure to take an anti-Trump stand is especially acute in the left-leaning technology world. After attempting to reach out to Trump by attending a meeting with him in New York, CEOs are girding for a high-stakes confrontation with the sitting president. “Silicon Valley is littered with immigrant success stories: Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, is an immigrant from India; Google co-founder Sergey Brin is a refugee from the former Soviet Union; and Omid Kordestani, Twitter’s executive chairman, was born in Iran. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant, leading Cook to say, in a letter denouncing Trump’s travel ban, that the company ‘wouldn’t exist’ if such a ban had been in place,” Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg report from San Francisco. Five nuggets from their story:

* A little more than half of U.S. start-ups that are estimated to be worth more than $1 billion were founded by immigrants, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, an Arlington think tank.

* In a new open letter, more than 115 Silicon Valley start-up founders and venture capitalists plead with the administration to cancel the immigration ban.

* Another letter from executives at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and others is also being drafted.

* Amazon and Expedia have joined a lawsuit brought by the state of Washington against the immigration ban.

* Some tech companies are now considering whether to move jobs out of the United States to places with more relaxed immigration policies, such as Vancouver and Dublin.

[...]

-- Even big media companies are now responding to pressure from the left:
The New Yorker just canceled the posh party that it holds at the W Hotel before the White House Correspondents Dinner, and Vanity Fair is pulling out of co-sponsoring the dinner’s most exclusive after-party (at the French ambassador’s residence). Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, told the New York Times that he will spend the weekend fishing in Connecticut instead. And comedian Samantha Bee plans to hold an alternative event on the night of the April 29 dinner.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/02/03/daily-202-more-companies-back-away-from-donald-trump-under-pressure-from-customers/58940a12e9b69b1406c75c7c/?utm_term=.240eb9f58ebb