I am the Chief Margin Officer at Target. You shop here every week.
We just posted our best quarter in years. The analysts called it a comeback. I would like to accept full personal credit, and I will, because the alternative is partial credit, and I did not get where I am by rounding down.
Here is how I did it. I found nearly $1 billion.
I say found. What happened is that the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs were illegal, and the government, which had taken the money, gave the money back. To me. A refund of $994 million, in a single quarter, adding $1.65 to my earnings per share, which is a phrase I do not fully understand but deliver with great confidence in rooms with good chairs.
Home Depot got $685 million the same way. We do not speak. But we nod.
People keep asking whether we will give the money back.
Give it back to whom? I paid the tariff. The government took a dollar of mine at the border, conceded eventually, in writing, in a 6-to-3 decision, that it had never been allowed to, and returned my dollar. That is my dollar, coming home. You were not part of that transaction.
You were, I will grant you, slightly upstream of it.
When the tariff cost me a dollar, I added a dollar to the towel. And the sheet. And the lamp shaped like a smaller lamp. I raised the price at the register, one household at a time, quietly, the way you raise a child or an alarm. That is arithmetic. I do not know why you are looking at me the way that you are looking at me.
Let me put it in the round numbers I prefer. The tariff cost the industry $160 billion. My share of it, I took from you, at the register, one towel at a time. Then the court gave my share back. I now have my share twice. I am told this is unusual. I looked into it briefly. I made my peace with it immediately, in the car.
Now some of you are suing. "Unjust enrichment," the lawyers call it. I looked the term up. It means becoming rich in a manner that distresses people who did not. I find the concept deeply unfair. There is no such thing as just enrichment. There is enrichment, and there is being one of the people it happened to, and you have selected the second category, and you have selected it, if I may, more than once.
I did give some of it back. I want that on the record. We lowered the price on 10,000 items.
Ten thousand. Say it slowly. It is a very large number, and I would like it to sit in the exact spot in your mind where the word "refund" used to live. I did not lower them by what I had raised them. I did not lower the same ones I raised. I did not tell you which ones. But 10,000 is a big and beautiful number, and the word "some" is technically true, and between those two facts I have built a home.
The tariff is gone now. You may have noticed that the price is not.
The candle is still $4.99. It was $3.99. I do not think about the candle. You think about the candle. The whole business lives in that gap, and this quarter the gap was worth $994 million.
Prices are like tattoos. They go on in an afternoon and they come off never, or with a laser, and I am not the laser. No one at the company is the laser. There is no laser. There is only me, and my quarter, and the good chairs.
The board gave me a bonus for the comeback. The comeback was a court ruling I had no hand in, concerning a law I have never read, decided by nine people I will never meet. I accepted the bonus regardless. Refusing it would have raised questions, and I have expensive taste, and a very particular sense of who deserves things, and it is, on reflection, me.
You keep telling me the money is yours.
I understand the feeling completely. I have felt it about a great many things that turned out to be mine. Most things, actually.
So here is the only sentence that matters, and I want you to keep it, because I have kept everything else. The tariff was illegal. The price was not. I live in the narrow space between those two facts.
It is a very nice space.
You built it.
You are not invited.
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