CEO’s are picking sides on the gun debate as corporate leaders have had increased pressure to speak out due to the uproar from angry customers and idealistic young employees. Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO took a stand stating “we don’t want to be a part of this story anymore,” and decided to raise the age requirement from buying guns in their stores from 18 to 21. Walmart, Kroger, and L.L. Bean have followed suit and also raised their requirement age after Dick’s made the move.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/04/news/companies/companies-nra-guns/index.html
5 comments:
I think it will be interesting to see what kind of reaction customers of Dick's will have to this recent change. I think they also said that they will not be selling AR-15 at all anymore. I respect the CEO of Dick's for making this decision, however it will be interesting to see if their overall sales will take a hit from the decision.
I believe that this type of PR action ultimately will not hurt their business as Dick's has not relied on this segment of their business over the years. In addition to that, the societal cost associated with seeing people lose their lives because of a gun sold by your company makes sense why the CEO would choose to no longer sell AR-15s particularly.
The article ends with a sentence that I found interesting and it is that "CEOs want to be on the right side of history.". I found these interesting because without following the life of the CEO of dicks that I don't know much about of, I wonder if the decision to change the age was to benefit the business or if it was his own opinion. I believe this decision will actually benefit the business because it might attract a lot of young customers, especially because Dicks was the first on making this decision and this could have an influence in the decision on where to shop for customers that agree with this decision.
Dick's Sporting Goods raising their required age to 21 from 18 will not prevent further gun violence to a large degree whatsoever. Violence is being caused by illegal arms and Federal regulation will do much more than private industry regulation.
While I am sure Dick's does a ton in gun sales I would be interested in what share of the market they have. Also this move I feel is a way to cover themselves in case another situation occurs again so that they cannot say the gun was obtained from their stores.
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