Dick’s is removing guns from 125 stores. Same store sales are down. I’m so sad. I don’t call for boycotts anymore, but I won’t shop there. Amazon sells all the things Dick’s does, and while Bezos isn’t a big gun guy, these days he’s too busy talking to divorce attorneys to even be half as woke as Ed Stack. Dick’s stock is up, because Wall Street is also woke AF these days.
12 thoughts on “I’m So Sad”
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I came down off my fence once I had to make a decision.
Not darkening their door again. I did some showrooming of some bicycles a little while back, but won’t be buying there.
Not boycotting, just not going out of my way.
I normally feel bad about doing this … but I use our Dicks strictly as a place to test things out. i.e. I take my kids in there to try on basketball shoes and then order them on Amazon. Normally I feel like a jerk when I do that at a store, but not with Dicks. Honestly I’d respect them more if they quit selling guns altogether.
Now if I could just get my wife to stop shopping there.
I’d guess they’re going to get out of the gun sales entirely shortly.
To be fair, I expect the tiny margins for the guns and the onerous paperwork is driving a lot of their decisions, but making a virtue signal out of necessity is going to cost them a LOT of goodwill.
Well you shouldn’t feel bad about it, they are the ones living up to their name…..
Sorry, not exactly on topic, but really wish a Scheel’s would come to my town. We have one an hour away, and I grew up with one in town. They can be pricey, but I’m regularly impressed by their staff.
When I was still going to Dick’s, I could not believe how absolutely stupid the staff were. High school kids pointing with their fingers in a generic direction any time you ask anything.
Full priced garbage, too. What are these places competing on when their staff are morons, they require a trip to and from after work, and they’re priced higher than Amazon? Really?
I think we need to do more to emphasize the “soft boycott effect”. We need to call it an effect, because unlike an official boycott, it’s something that’s not intentional: it’s something that lots of people choose to do: quietly and on their own accord (or maybe they’ll sometimes manage to work up enough energy to send an email complaint) refuse to support something.
There’s a recent WWII game that put female protagonists in combat, which caused a lot of people to be up in arms about it — because it significantly clashed with historical accuracy. Someone suggested that they put in a skins option that enabled historically accurate characters, but the response of the game company was “Sure: do you want that above or below the “Whites only” option?”.
That discouraged a lot of people from wanting to play the game. I don’t know if there was a formal call for a boycott…but I’m sure that even if there was, there were a lot of people who were unaware of it, and just said “Hey, if this is how you’re going to treat us, we could always find other ways to entertain ourselves.” And that’s what they did, and the game bombed.
There’s only so much customer alienation you can do before it starts to significantly eat into your profits — all because a lot of customers decide “Meh, I don’t care anymore. I can always take my business elsewhere.”
I remember that. I remember thinking that the game publisher was needlessly stepping on a rake with that response, when it could have been handled a lot more gracefully. For example:
“We’re a video game publisher, and so it’s in our business interest to try to make our games accessible to the broadest audience possible. In some cases this means compromising on historical accuracy in order to include characters who our players can more easily identify with. We understand this might be disappointing to players who were expecting us to be 100% faithful to history, but we hope that they’ll give our game a chance anyway.”
Voila: you’ve just stuck to your guns and defended your creative license while managing to avoid being a gigantic asshole who alienates prospective customers. It’s not hard.
Technically speaking it would be a No Blacks option since Indians, Mexicans and Asians were always in the units. And even that wouldn’t be right since there were all-black combat units and toward the end individual blacks were being fed in as replacements. Lots of blacks in support units too but I suppose those don’t show up much in gaming even though they are most of the military. And on warships, everyone is a combatant. See Doris Miller for example who not only engaged in combat at Pearl Harbor but was KIA later in the war. I would appear that the the publisher was not only engaged in PC BS but doesn’t appear to know his subject very well. One wonders about the rest of the game.
If I recall correctly, the game company created previous versions of the game with minority protagonists, and people didn’t have a problem with that, because of historical accuracy.
The fact that they so willingly attributed “wanting historical accuracy” with “you’re a borderline racist” is bound to rub people the wrong way!
couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes…
I use Dicks as a showroom and then buy online.
As far as a soft boycott, that was my response to Target when they came out with that stupid bathroom policy. I did a lot of shopping there. Now, I only darken their doorway for a couple of items. I have noticed that the amount of vehicles parking there is reduced since this subject blew up.