On Thursday, one of the largest and most prestigious retail chains in the country cut business ties with Ivanka Trump. Haley Peterson with Business Insider reports that Nordstrom based their decision due to a decline in sales.
"Each year we cut about 10% [of brands carried] and refresh our assortment with about the same amount," a Nordstrom representative told Business Insider. "In this case, based on the brand's performance we've decided not to buy it for this season."
Trump's brand, which sells women's clothing, shoes, and handbags, was available on Nordstrom's website as recently as Wednesday. On Thursday, Trump was not listed on Nordstrom's master list of brands available, as Business Insider previously reported.
A boycott opposing Trump was launched last fall by marketing brand strategist Shannon Coulter and grandmother Sue Atencio — a lifelong Nordstrom customer who posted an open letter to the department store on Twitter demanding that it stop selling items from Trump's $100 million clothing and accessories line. Atencio’s letter was inspired after Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood “grab them by the p-sy” remarks were nationally exposed.
"The hate speech directed at African Americans, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, LGBT people, and women by the Trump campaign is unacceptable and does not seem to represent Nordstrom's values," she wrote, according to a copy of the letter that she posted on Twitter. "Yet Ms. Trump continues to defend it, and Nordstrom continues to defend her."
The hashtag #GrabYourWallet quickly garnered nearly 119 million impressions on Twitter, according to Retweet Rank. At the time, The Wrap posted a statement by Nordstrom saying the retail chain had no intention of dropping the brand. Coulter has been tracking Nordstrom's inventory levels now for two months. Between the first week of December and the first week of February, the Ivanka brand products dropped from 71 — to only nine available online.
Nordstrom denies the decision had anything to do with politics.
"We hope that offering a vendor's products isn't misunderstood as us taking a political position; we're not," the company said at the time. "We recognize our customers can make choices about what they purchase based on personal views and we'll continue to give them options."
No one will be surprised if Donald Trump decides to retaliate against Nordstrom on Twitter, and yet it’s still hard to believe we have a spiteful, vindictive, hateful, spoiled and revengeful man in our Oval Office, who thinks it’s okay to publicly bully and harm businesses that cross him in any way, shape, or form.
It would have been admirable if Nordstrom would have admitted that the boycott and the toxic Trump name impacted its sales and thus its decision to cut ties with Ivanka. Either way, it’s good to see American boycotts are still working. In this case, the protest exemplifies one more form of #Resistance. Kudos to Coulter and Atencio for initiating the boycott, and all the concerned consumers who realize that where they spend their hard-earned taxed dollars — can actually make a difference.
Via: Being Liberal