Ohio-based Dick’s Sporting Goods and their CEO, Ed Stack, have been headline news in recent days.
Stack is being hailed for his “woke” stance on gun control and as being a leader in the crowd of corporate CEOs pushing for gun control.
But no doubt shareholders weren’t impressed to learn this week that their CEO’s radical leftist ideals have cost his investors nearly a quarter of a BILLION dollars.
Starting after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, Dick’s has embraced one anti-gun policy after the next.
In the months after that school shooting, Dick’s pulled AR-15’s off the shelf temporarily.
Then in 2015, Stack decided to stop selling guns to anybody under 21 years of age, even though the legal age for many guns was only 18 years old.
Finally, in 2018, after the Parkland shooting, Dick’s announced they were going to permanently stop selling AR-15s nationwide, ban high capacity magazines, bump stocks, and more.
Only recently was it revealed during a CBS interview that Dick’s destroyed the $5 million dollars in AR-15’s they had in stock at the time.
But during the same interview, Stack let out another company tidbit: his apparently unilateral decisions have cost Dick’s Sporting Goods nearly $250,000,000.
In a recent interview, Stack spoke to the hefty price tag of his decision:
Reporter: “How much did you think you were going to lose?”
“A quarter of a billion dollars,” Stack replied.
“And how much did you actually lose?”
“About a quarter of a billion! Pretty close.”
That’s interesting, since at a shareholder’s meeting in March of 2019, Stack claimed the number was only $150 million.
Have they really lost $100 million dollars since March? Or was he soft-pedaling the numbers in March? Who knows?
Stack isn’t backing down, either.
Since taking that financial hit, Dick’s has announced that they’ve removed gun sales entirely from more than 100 stores and are considering removing them from all their remaining 600 stores.
In a recent CBS Sunday interview, Stack said, “We’ve got the whole category under strategic review to see what we’re going to do with this category,” he said.
“So, there’s a chance you may stop selling firearms completely?” asked the reporter. Stack replied, “The whole category is under strategic review . . . So many people say to me, you know, ‘If we do what you want to do, it’s not going to stop these mass shootings.’ And my response is, ‘You’re probably right, it won’t. But if we do these things and it saves one life, don’t you think it’s worth it?'”
Apparently, all the lives of people defending themselves and others with AR-15’s don’t matter.
Either way, Dick’s is going to continue hemorrhaging money after gun owners leave in droves.
You want to saw guns in half and drive your company into the ground?
Go right ahead.