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Dick’s Sporting Goods: May They Go Bankrupt
It’s one thing to adopt a policy to appeal to the PC era we’re in. However, I think Dick’s has gone way too far with their latest lame attempt at virtue-signaling:
Dick’s Sporting Goods announced on Monday it will destroy all of the unsold firearms it pulled off store shelves in February after the deadly Parkland school shooting.
The sports retailer decided to destroy the assault-style rifles instead of returning them to the manufacturer, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported. On Feb. 28, 2018, the Pittsburgh-based company announced it would immediately stop selling assault-style rifles and ban the sale of all guns to anyone under 21. It was not immediately clear how many firearms will be destroyed.
“We are in the process of destroying all firearms and accessories that are no longer for sale as a result of our February 28th policy change,” a spokesperson from Dick’s Sporting Goods told the media outlet. “We are destroying the firearms in accordance with federal guidelines and regulations.”
Okay, so they don’t want to sell these firearms to people under 21. But now, they’ve gone a step too far. They could have donated these weapons to law enforcement, or to private security firms.
But noooooooo! They want the photo op of a bulldozer shoveling these finely crafted weapons into a furnace, a crusher, or whatever.
May they go out of business for good.
Published in General
Firearms manufacturers can sue them if they still owe them money and they destroy property.
Right?
If they believe these models of guns are evil, they’re evil, whether they are wielded by someone with or without a badge. It’s all quite moronic, of course. How many millions of “assault rifles” are in the hands of Americans, and how many dozen have been used to commit a homicide? I guess Dick’s Sporting Goods figures they will capitalize on a customer base of outdoorsmen/women who hate guns.
I don’t patronize Dick’s and am confused (not necessarily in that order). At the time of Dick’s original foray into virtue signaling, the point was made that the Dick’s stores themselves didn’t actually carry many (any?) guns, and that a subsidiary did most of the business.
This raises a question as to how many, and what type, of gun is involved. Or is it too much to ask for Dick’s to say “Hey, we threw out two Remington Camos and a Mossberg today!”?
I haven’t darkened the door of Dick’s since their last virtue-signalling stunt (was it after the Aurora shooting?). The nearest Dick’s is about 1/4 mile from Cabellas, so I’m not sacrificing much, but I’d still avoid shopping there even if I was.
I still avoid buying Duracell batteries due to them contributing to an anti-gun group back in the ’90s.
I’ll not completely stop shopping at Walmart for groceries and such over their “under-21” policy, but I’ve bought my last ammo from them, and I’ll avoid going to Walmart if there’s a reasonable alternative, even if it costs more.
We’ve been thinking about refinancing our mortgage to do some home repairs. Bank of America is no longer even a consideration.
I don’t see why not.
I wonder what the board of directors thinks about this needless flushing of assets.
They don’t sell handguns, if they destroy inventory I would assume that they already have paid the manufacturer’s for the firearms. I wouldn’t think that firearms manufacturer’s could afford to supply firearms to national retailers, and then wait for payment on a consignment basis, not to mention the BATF paperwork for that kind of transfer of ownership.
The Dick’s Sporting Good’s, and Walmart’s that I’ve been in have seemed disinterested, and have little knowledge of the firearms they sell. Obviously I haven’t been in all their stores.
I think the expression is “Get Woke, Go Broke.”
Starbucks is now on the slide.
When Dick’s announced their 21 years of age for long guns policy I stopped going there and unsubscribed from their emails. What hubris to believe that young men and women can handle a voting booth but not a long gun. And now this? [Redacted before posting]
Dick’s is the closest actual sporting goods store to my house, about a mile and a half away.
The next-closest “real” store is Bass Pro Shops, eleven miles away.
Guess which one gets my athletic equipment business now (when I don’t get it from Amazon)?
Guns? Well, I end up buying all of mine from an actual gun store in town, usually at their booth at a gun show. Just a couple of thousand bucks over the last three or four years. Dick’s was never price-competitive, anyway.
Guns have been in existence since the founding. Been used in wars, hunting and crime since then. Dick’s has been around a while also, long enough to have formed a solid opinion about them for their business model. They hopped a ride on the tragedy train hoping to get some sympathy themselves. They don’t produce anything, they sell stuff others make.
Dick’s is pretty disinterested, and has little interest in everything else they sell also.
They are convenient, but I can buy sporting goods somewhere other than Dick’s or REI. Maybe Cabela’s , a local gun shop, or Campmor , Duluth Trading, or Sierra Trading Post.
Not sure of what the problem is. If they don’t want to sell guns or ammo then good for them. Makes gun shops more profitable and in demand and less likely to be ran out by a big box store with no clue of what they are selling.
I think it’s a fair bet they looked at their long-term sales trends before making such a decision. Nobody stops selling a product if it’s a vital part of their business.
Where are the majority of Dick’s stores actually located ?
Now, where do gun owners live?
I wager Dick’s has more to fear from Amazon than from angry gun buyers.
Incidentally, does anybody know why gun ownership rates in Nebraska are so low? As a rural, agricultural state, it seems like it should be the archetypical “gun state”.
Or why Hawaii is so high? As I recall, the gun laws in Hawaii are terrible. I would expect a state that has a lot of gun owners would elect a state legislature that is not hostile towards gun ownership.
Over 67% of Hawaii’s (permanent) population lives on Oahu (and that percentage is much higher if you include tourists). What’s the police presence like on the other seven islands where the other 33% live, where the population density is much lower, the environment is much more rural, and the primary industry is agriculture rather than tourism?
The biggest political divide isn’t race, or gender, or even class. It’s population density. This is precisely why so many Progressives want everybody to move to cities.
Absolutely fair point and the graphics tell a fascinating story. Still, how does embracing gun control add rather than detract from their bottom line? Quietly scaling back their gun departments might make sense — but virtually signaling and demonizing customers doesn’t.
Maybe they don’t tell the people taking the survey they own guns, just in case . . .
I do not buy a lot of sporting goods, but anyone who loves freedom should buy them elsewhere. Big 5 is still (I think) a 2nd Amendment supporting company.
At least the first map is out of date. There are two Dick’s stores that I know of here in Idaho’s Treasure Valley (Boise and environs). No, I’ve never been in either of them, and never will. The geographic observations are a propos, however, they may have foreclosed on some possible futures for growth.
And aren’t there laws protecting artists and artwork? There are in my state. And aren’t some firearms works of art (to some at least)?
Make sure you tell them, please.
Here’s a county-by-county heat map on online shopping:
Note how well it correlates with both gun ownership and the density of Dick’s locations, particularly in the Boston-to-Washington corridor, Chicago, and Ohio.
Dick’s has to do something to convince urban consumers to drive to their stores rather than ordering online from Amazon. Quietly phasing out gun sales wouldn’t do the trick. These are precisely the sort of consumers who make buying decisions based on the perceived virtue of the retailer. Dick’s needs to make a big symbolic statement to get them in the store. Virtue signalling makes perfect sense when you’re targeting the same market that shops at places like Whole Foods, The Body Shop, etc.
How well is Idaho’s Treasure Valley already served by other sporting goods retailers and/or gun shops? Would Dick’s be moving into an already saturated market?
As for future growth, yes Idaho is currently the fastest-growing state in the USA, with 2.2% annual population growth. However, it helps that it starts from such a low baseline. The entire state has a population about the same size as Montreal or Phoenix.
Trying to appeal to every market in a country as large and diverse as the United States is not always (or even often) the best strategy. Dick’s is clearly targeting a specific type of market. i.e. urbanites who like to think of themselves as nature-lovers or sports enthusiasts.
Sporting goods is a field where antagonizing half your potential customers is not good marketing. People who have kids that play sports tend to be on the conservative side of the equation. Paul Gigot has referred to this, only partly facetiously, as “The Roe Effect” since leftists are more likely to abort pregnancies and, if children are allowed to be born, to have one child families. City life, when the left predominates in demographics, tends to be a poor place to raise children. I don’t know the proportion of sporting goods stores sales are to children and their teams but I would guess quite a lot. It would seem short sighted to alienate those more likely to buy sporting goods.
I greatly question the idea that half of Dick’s target market are gun owners.
Well, their research must suck big time. I’m a classic right-wing nut job, but I love Amazon. Urban folks order from Amazon for the same reason I do–variety, availability, no need to drive around town, and (in most cases) two day delivery.
That’s seems like it could be support for my thesis. Your statement arguably could illustrate why they’re better off not targeting classic right-wing nut jobs.
If gun buyers are a tiny proportion of Dick’s customer base, and anti-gun urbanites are a much larger proportion of their customer base, it makes perfect sense which demographic they’d cater to. Better to lose a small market and keep a large one than to keep a small market and lose a large one.
Even if right-wingers and left-wingers were exactly the same size and distributed equally across the country (which they definitely are not), if the market research shows that right-wingers and left-wingers don’t tend to shop at the same stores it would still make perfect sense for retailers to target their markets accordingly.
Simply put, my wager is that Dick’s has way better access to market research numbers than the members of the peanut gallery do, and they make their marketing decisions accordingly.
Note – Dick’s announced it would stop selling assault rifles in February 2018:
Also note – In summer of 2017, Dick’s already looked like it was well on its way to oblivion, and that was long before they announced they would stop selling “assault style” weapons.
Final note – Dick’s hasn’t announced it’ll stop selling all firearms. It’s only announced it’ll stop selling “assault style” firearms. Whattaya wanna bet that this type of firearm wasn’t even a top seller for them when compared to other firearms?
My assessment is that the map is bogus. It’s based on a voluntary, online survey of only 4622 self-selected people after which they downselected to 4000 to make it “nationally representative”.
Imagine how many gun owners quit and never completed the survey after they realized it was being used to inform “public health strategies that aim to change gun ownership in the USA.”