I’ll bet that Dick’s Sporting Goods will not remain one of the largest sports retailers for long in light of this utterly bone-headed move by the CEO:
One of the nation’s largest sports retailers, Dick’s Sporting Goods, said Wednesday morning it was immediately ending sales of all assault-style rifles in its stores. The retailer also said that it would no longer sell high-capacity magazines and that it would not sell any gun to anyone under 21 years of age, regardless of local laws.
The announcement, made two weeks after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff members, is one of the strongest stances taken by corporate America in the national gun debate. It also carries symbolic weight, coming from a prominent national gunseller.
Late last week, after coming under attack on social media for their ties to the National Rifle Association, a number of major companies, including Hertz car rental, MetLife insurance and Delta Air Lines, publicly ended those relationships, issuing brief, carefully phrased statements.
But Edward Stack, the 63-year-old chief executive of Dick’s whose father founded the store in 1948, is deliberately steering his company directly into the storm, making clear that the company’s new policy was a direct response to the Florida shooting. “When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset,” Mr. Stack said in an interview Tuesday evening. “We love these kids and their rallying cry, ‘enough is enough.’ It got to us.”
I look forward to the future articles denying that this decision by the CEO to steer the company “directly into the storm” has anything to do with the totally unanticipated 18-percent decline in annual sales in 2018.
“The whole hunting business is an important part of our business, and we know there is going to be backlash on this,” said Mr. Stack. “But we’re willing to accept that.”
It will be interesting to see how long it takes him to change his tune. Notice how it is almost never the founders of companies who ever do anything this stupid? It’s always heirs and infiltrators, which tends to demonstrate that those who do not create businesses may understand how to work the internal machinery and manage the processes established, but they lack an inherent understanding of why and how the business exists in the first place.