November has a way of making investors feel like they need an opinion about the market. The index is near a record, the AI trade is wobbling, and every headline wants you to decide whether this is the top. Nobody knows, and the portfolios that can thrive during the long stretches of uncertainty share one
November has a way of making investors feel like they need an opinion about the market. The index is near a record, the AI trade is wobbling, and every headline wants you to decide whether this is the top. Nobody knows, and the portfolios that can thrive during the long stretches of uncertainty share one trait: They include a healthy helping of reliable dividend payers.
The three consumer companies below have paid and raised their dividends through recessions, pandemics, and the bursting of more than one market bubble. Two of them are in the middle of the biggest deals in their histories. All three sell things people keep restocking for their homes in good months and bad.
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1. Target: 55 straight years of dividend raises and a store that still matters
In June, discount retail giant Target (NYSE: TGT) increased its quarterly dividend by 1.8% to $1.16 per share, making 2026 the 55th straight year it has raised its payout. At the current share price of near $163, that works out to a yield just over 3%, but the dividend still consumes less than half of its earnings, which leaves the company plenty of room to conduct share buybacks and invest in the stores themselves.
The reason Target belongs in retail investors’ portfolios is not the yield alone. It is that the company keeps acting like a retailer that expects to be around for another 55 years. This fall, it relaunched Threshold, its house brand for home goods, finished a full remodel of its SoHo store in Manhattan, and promoted a shopping list showing that folks could pull together a Thanksgiving dinner for six in its stores for just $30.
The chain’s dividend-hiking streak started in 1971, which means Target raised its payouts through every market the S&P 500 has produced since Richard Nixon was president.
2. McCormick: A 4% yield from the spice rack
Spice and sauce powerhouse McCormick (NYSE: MKC) is paying a quarterly dividend of $0.48 per share, up from $0.45 per share a year ago, and has raised its dividend annually for 40 consecutive years. From its 2020 peak above $100, the stock has fallen to about $48 today, which pushed its yield up to nearly 4%, the highest it has been in a generation.
What has investors nervous this year — and what contributed to its year-to-date decline of around 28% in the stock — is McCormick’s pending combination with Unilever’s foods business, which the two companies announced in March. That deal would create a company with about $20 billion in annual revenue, with roughly $600 million in expected cost savings, according to Reuters. It’s slated to close by mid-2027.
Meanwhile, McCormick’s existing business keeps doing what it does. Third-quarter sales rose 17%, gross margin expanded by 190 basis points, and McCormick de Mexico, which it acquired a majority interest in back in January, is already integrated. Spices and sauces are among the least cyclical products in the grocery store — even in a recession, people are still going to season their food. So McCormick is the kind of business you want dishing out quarterly payments to you while the market argues about chip stocks.
3. Sysco: The company that feeds the restaurants
Sysco (NYSE: SYY) has raised its dividend for 57 straight years and now pays $0.55 per share each quarter. Because its streak of hikes has hit the 50-year mark, it has earned the rare title of Dividend King. It’s also the most ambitious of these three companies right now. In March, it agreed to buy Restaurant Depot, the cash-and-carry chain where independent restaurant owners go to load up on a wide array of the items they require, from paper towels to chicken. That deal moves Sysco into a higher-margin channel that it previously didn’t have.
Sysco already delivers to more than 700,000 customer locations, and every one of those food service locations needs its trucks to show up every week, regardless of whether the S&P 500 is up or down. That is my whole case. The company reported its fiscal 2027 first-quarter results on Nov. 3 and held its full-year guidance steady. Its payout ratio of around 60% is high for a distributor, but Sysco has sustained that for years. Add the Restaurant Depot deal, and you have a reliable dividend grower that is also, for the first time in a while, a growth stock story.
Why these three, together
Target gets you the consumer, McCormick gets you the pantry, and Sysco gets you every restaurant in between. None of them are exciting, which is actually the point. To me, the right way to own them is to make them the ballast in a portfolio that also holds the growth names everyone is nervous about this month.
If November goes badly for Wall Street, these three will pay you anyway. If it goes well, you will own three companies that have been raising their dividends since before many of today’s investors were born.
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Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Sysco and Target. The Motley Fool recommends McCormick. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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