Sears, Kmart Join Other Retailers Dropping Trump-Branded Items
Sears Holdings, the company that owns retail chains Sears and Kmart, reportedly said this weekend that it would remove 31 Trump-branded items from its website. The move makes Sears the latest retailer to ditch products bearing the Trump name. In the past week or so, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Belk stopped selling Ivanka Trump's branded line of clothing, shoes and jewelry amid an aggressive campaign to boycott the Trump brand called Grab Your Wallet, which has been urging shoppers to boycott retailers that carry products with the Trump name. Retailers such as Bloomingdale's, Amazon.com, Lord & Taylor, Macy's and Zappos all still carry Ivanka Trump products.
Total Retail’s Take: In their statements explaining their decisions to stop selling Trump products, all of the retailers claimed they were based on profit, not politics. Nordstrom, for example, said, “over the past year, and particularly in the last half of 2016, sales of the brand have steadily declined to the point where it didn't make good business sense for us to continue with the line for now." Neiman Marcus made a similar statement, saying the company assesses brands "based on productivity." What’s not clear, however, is whether the Grab Your Wallet boycott is contributing to a decline in sales for the products.
