The Patriot Post® · Is Wokeness Good for Business?

Does going woke leave a business broke? Or are woke policies and pronouncements actually good for business?

When we heard that loudmouth lefty tech billionaire and “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban had endorsed wokeness as making good business sense, we cringed. Maybe that’s because we wanted him to be wrong, but in our heart of hearts we knew he had a point.

In an interview Sunday with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cuban, who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, weighed into the ongoing consumer backlash against Bud Light and Target for their decisions to promote the Rainbow Mafia in their brands — the former in its advertising, the latter on its retail shopping floor.

In this limited context, the answer seemed obvious. But not to Cuban.

“There is a reason,” he said, “almost all the top 10 market cap companies in the U.S. can be considered ‘woke.’ It’s good business.”

Good business? Is it good business when Anheuser-Busch is encouraging retailers of its once-leading Bud Light beer to dump the dated product for $3.95 a case rather than having to yank it off the shelves and destroy it? Is it good business when Target sees its market cap drop billions of dollars since the company began displaying grotesque “tuck-friendly” women’s swimsuits for “transgender” men and boys as part of its “Pride Month” observance?

It sure doesn’t seem so. As Fox Business reports, Bud Light “has seen a 23.9% decrease in sales on a dollar basis compared to a year ago,” while Target’s stock took a hit of “roughly 3.1% within the last five days and approximately 18.5% in the last month.”

No big deal, says Cuban. “First a dip in market cap is meaningless,” he said. “You have to realize that there aren’t many individual owners of stocks — almost all ownership is via funds, and most trading is quantitative. So, it’s not like the drop is because tens of thousands of individual holders sold their stocks.” As he told the Post-Gazette, “People want to do business with companies that care about their customers,” which he calls “an American trait he says reflects who we are as a country.”

As for the very real drop in sales? “Most CEOs,” Cuban says, “have enough experience to know to just wait out the news cycle until they go to the next one.”

If we had to guess, we’d bet the aforementioned companies are wondering just how long a “news cycle” lasts.

Here, we might consider Disney, too, whose stock has taken a major hit in recent years and whose leadership has been reduced to suing Florida’s hugely popular Republican governor. Indeed, Disney’s woke policies have consistently eroded the mores and values that built the company — a company that’s now run by agenda-driven groomers as opposed to those who rightly understood that its appeal came from its wholesome image and family-friendliness.

How bad has it gotten for Disney? This bad: Rival Universal’s Islands of Adventure theme park now has more visitors than three of Disney’s four parks in Florida. And, as columnist Salena Zito notes, “A recent Axios/Harris corporate brand poll that shows the company is ranked the fifth most polarizing brand out of 100, with their reputation free-falling from number five in positive reputation in 2019 to number 77 this year.”

This was no “news cycle.” Disney’s gonna need a bigger boat.

Cuban’s “Shark Tank” costar, Kevin O'Leary, took issue with his colleague’s assessment, arguing on Fox News that customers come in all shapes and sizes and political affiliations:

When you’re Disney or you’re a beer company or you’re Target, you have customers of every kind. Republicans, Democrats, gender-specific or gender-neutral. It doesn’t matter. You want to sell everybody everything all of the time. When you get involved in partisan issues, you basically lose 50% of your constituency. … The role of a business, a corporation in America for the last 200 years, has been to serve customers, their employees and their shareholders. Their role is not to educate society on the social issue of the day. They’re learning that very quickly. And in the case of business, you can measure it by the second when they’re public by the stock price. When you lose $9, $10, $11, $12 billion of market cap, you know that you’ve offended somebody, and that person is your customer. That’s bad business. Really bad business.

But much as we hate to admit it, Cuban is probably right on balance that woke policies are good for business — at least in the sense that if a business crosses the Rainbow Mafia, it will be destroyed. And most Americans are oblivious to the damage being done by them. Indeed, Republicans long ago lost corporate America. “Conservatives,” according to The Wall Street Journal, “say the fault for the breakup lies with CEOs who increasingly meddle in politics by taking progressive stances on divisive social issues. Executives who had hoped such rancor would fade when Donald Trump left office are now facing a hostile GOP in Congress.”

The reality is that whether wokeness works can only be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Bud Light’s customers, for example, are not the same customers as, say, Nike’s or Citibank’s.

And yet, as shoe salesman extraordinaire Michael Jordan once famously put it, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

We think His Airness was onto something.