This week the boycott economy produced a rare treat: a craft store, a warehouse club, and a pizza brand all trending at once, and only one of them wants your money back. Leading the pile is Michaels, whose woke score just landed in our database at 45/100 — the same week a boycott call over a refused Trump portrait crossed 72.9K views on X.
The Michaels framing story everyone's sharing
On October 28, the account @GuntherEagleman posted that an Ohio customer brought a Trump portrait into a Michaels custom-framing counter and was told the shop wouldn't frame it because it was, per the post, "too political." The boycott call pulled 509 replies, 2,374 reposts, and 72.9K views. To be clear about what's verified: this is a single customer account relayed through a viral post — Michaels has not confirmed the exchange, and we frame it as a claim, not established fact. But the claim lit a fuse precisely because it matches a pattern shoppers already believe: politics flows one direction through the register.
Our scoring team had Michaels in the pipeline before the story broke. The 45/100 woke score is now published, and it's a textbook mid-tier profile: the company runs a named Inclusion & Diversity program, maintains a Supplier Diversity Council, launched the "Makers Like Me" disability-hiring initiative, and sells an annual Pride collection in its seasonal aisle. Nothing in the file alleges the framing counter itself has a politics policy — the score reflects the corporate programs, not the viral anecdote. Both things can be true: a 45/100 company, and an unverified counter story doing 72.9K views. Shoppers are allowed to weigh both.
Costco's halal claim is bigger — and thinner
Out-pulling Michaels almost four-to-one is a claim about Costco: a post from @GawTanya stating that a Langley, British Columbia warehouse sells only halal-certified meat and that the company "doubled down" when asked. That card has now grown to 247.1K views (726 replies, 1,421 reposts, 3,185 likes). Here the accuracy bar matters more than the engagement: this is a single-source customer claim, unverified by Costco, with no independent confirmation in the three days since it posted. If you share it, attribute it. What we can print without an asterisk is Costco's score: 45/100, a straddle-the-line profile that keeps DEI language present without going full throttle — a playbook we've documented across retail generally and general merchandise brands specifically.
The WNBA anthem walkout: boycott vs. counter-post
The week's biggest fresh boycott call targets the WNBA after players walked out during the National Anthem. @CreasonJana's "BOYCOTT the @WNBA" post sits at 24.5K views — but the more interesting number is the reply it provoked. A quote-post of player Sophie Cunningham saying she'd "shout out our veterans" pulled 93.3K views, four times the boycott call itself. The audience is voting, and it's voting for the league-product framing over the player-attack framing. Our WNBA score is 45/100: the first U.S. pro league with a league-wide Pride platform (2014), a standing Social Justice Council, and a 2025 Commissioner's Cup that directed giving to the ACLU and allied groups. Score the institution, skip the pile-on.
Winner-side energy: Red Baron freezes the score and the pepperoni
Here's the pattern worth building a shopping list around: praise out-pulling protest. Red Baron now has two viral fan cards in a single week — a dad-of-six patronage pledge at 138.3K on Thursday, and @SMB_Attorney's "The 'Woke' Companies will always lose… Bravo!!" post at 337.3K on Friday. That's more engagement than the Michaels, Costco, and WNBA boycott calls combined, for a frozen pizza brand whose entire woke file amounts to parent company Schwan's corporate-responsibility reporting. Hence the score: 10/100, mildly woke — about as clean as the food and beverage aisle gets. Counter-boycott energy is now the strongest current in the feed, and it's the one brands can actually earn with a decade of staying quiet.
The contrast case: Target's shelf brands can't leave
Why does this matter beyond one news cycle? Because the brands that went all-in can't quietly come back. Retail Dive reported October 30 that The Lip Bar — a beauty brand that built its identity inside Target's diversity merchandising programs — says it effectively can't afford to exit the retailer even as the DEI era cools. Target scores 71/100, extremely woke, and the same-sex-couple "Made to Matter" advertising lineage in its file is the reason the Lip Bars of the world got shelf space at all. When the political wind shifts, the anchor tenant keeps its doors open and the diversity-launched brands stay stuck on the shelf. That's the DEI trap in one sentence, and it's why we score brands instead of just raging at them.
The verdict
Michaels at 45 is a "shop with eyes open" score, not a burn-it-down score — and the Trump-portrait story, whatever the counter camera ultimately shows, is a referendum on whether customers believe corporate neutrality is real. Costco at 45 with a 247.1K-view unverified claim is a reminder that in 2026, the receipt travels faster than the verification. And Red Baron at 10 proves the demand side is real: Americans aren't just angry at woke brands, they're actively looking for the ones that never played the game. Check your own brands in the database before the next news cycle — the scores are the part of this story that doesn't expire.