ANTI-GUN SENTIMENT SHRINKS DICK’S. In reference to this article. I’m actually really hoping Dick’s gets out of the gun business entirely, if only so I don’t have to listen to the fuddie duddies talk about getting this or that at Dick’s. Not everyone gets the message. They’ve been a problem for years. None of this shit is new. It’s just that the mask is off now.
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His stockholders should sue him. His job is to run a profitable company, not push his personal agenda.
Dicks is our own little piece of the communization of American corporate culture but it is a much larger problem. The whole enterprise is lurching to the left on any number of issues. I recently had an extended discussion with my broker re the disgusting pronouncement by the Business Roundtable downgrading shareholders to benefit other “stakeholders” presumably environmentalists and Al Sharpton. My concern was whether the signatories, which were about 50% of the economy, could be depended on safeguard my investments. In the course of the conversation, he recounted conversations with other clients who were moving money away from corporations who do not reflect their values. My broker, and I think most of his clients, are conservatives.
I wouldn’t support Warren for any reason but should she be elected, corporate America has it coming.
Are you referring to this? https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans
I don’t see anything wrong with this. It’s standard polished corporate speak. Are you really looking for something different? It’s pretty simple. If they can’t make money by not pissing off the other potential customers then they can’t do much of any of their platitudes since they’ll be out of business. By the time little Dicks recognizes this then it will have been too late for them.
Agree with you about Warren, but unfortunately we’ve all already latched our jaws to the Wall Street teat since our investments for our livelihoods (401ks, IRAs, pensions, etc.) are totally dependent on them. That ship sailed once we decided we were moving away from defined benefit pensions.
I do have a problem with corporate management doing anything besides maximizing profits. They are using the owner’s (stockholders) money to fund their own political priories.
Defined benefit pensions are highly dependent on Wall Street too. Most of the money comes from investment not contributions. DB plans are one of the biggest, it not THE biggest institutional investors. And by the way, many of them violate their fiduciary duties to pursue their political hobby horses too. CA is probably the worst. They have distorted their investment priorities with politics in so many ways I have lost track.
“We” had NO say in the corporations moving from defined benefits plans to self-directed retirement plans. It was all about the corps no longer having to be responsible for funding their retirees pensions period, stop.
Or the admission that they couldn’t afford to fund DB pensions.
If you put the same money in on the front end and make equivalent investments, DB pensions will produce exactly the same benefits as DC plans. The switch had more to do with who bore the investment risk. There is suspicion also that the change was a stealth reduction in benefits. That is not a function of DB vs DC but the funding level. The coming of ERISA and PBGC made the kind of pension fraud that was prevalent more difficult and dangerous. Of course, this does not apply to the public sector so fraud is still common there.
Years run together, so forgive for not remembering exactly what years these were, but more than a decade ago I tried to get some interest around my club in the fact that Dick’s was (locally) enforcing NJ law in PA; even on PA residents. Since we had many NJ resident members, it was quite possible, even likely, that NJ residents were buying ammo and accessories to use at our club in PA, i.e., totally legally. In any case, it was not Dick’s job to enforce NJ law in another state.
As I recall things, interest in that factoid was at best muted, and not outraged as it should have been. I think one of my rants on the issue made it as far as Ammoland (or?) but that was about it. All my experience has pointed to, that gun owners seldom see a problem until someone suitably anointed “officially” tells them there is a problem. Mere mortals processing the evidence of their senses doesn’t cut it.
E.g., the county sheriff for several years charged nearly twice the codified application fee for carry permits, and no one blinked an eye. Figuring I had gotten my card punched challenging the previous sheriff’s “doctors note” requirement back in 1995, I chose to go with my fellow gun owners’ consensus; don’t make trouble for a Republican sheriff who channels The Duke.
But relevant to Dick’s: Sort of like that other guy with the Sudetenland, they started out small to see what we would allow them to get away with. And the answer was, “murder.”
I seemed to remember writing about that a while back, and it looks like I did. I may have heard it from you first, and then looked for a source I could link to in a post.
I think I wrote about it while I was still chairman of the club legislative committee, and that would have been a few years before your post. (You’d think I’d dig into my archives for the CD where I saved all those columns, wouldn’t you? But maybe I’m enjoying letting the past be the past, Old Stories notwithstanding.)
But seriously: It came to seem to me, that for our rank-and-file to really respond to any issue, took an entity like the NRA to tell them it was an issue, or at least an “established” entity with a national presence like GOA, SAF/CCRKBA, etc. I don’t recall any major entity seriously (or at all?) jumping on an anti-Dick’s bandwagon, so I don’t think Dick’s suffered much for their smaller transgressions; which pretty much guaranteed ever bigger transgressions.
My column at Ammoland was in February 2010, so close to two years before your post. (I keep confusing when I retired from my business, with when I retired from club offices, which was a couple years later.)
I don’t really remember either. Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve been on the board for a decade. Doesn’t seem that long.
I’ve always tried to keep club business off of here. even when it would benefit other people who might be in the same situation. So it doesn’t surprise me that I didn’t say anything about it here until later.