There is a wall at the back of every big sporting goods store where the rifles go. Glass case, wood stocks, fluorescent light, a guy with a key on a coiled cord. I bought cleats forty feet from that case as a kid and never thought about it once, which is exactly how retail merchandising is supposed to work.
On Wednesday Dick's Sporting Goods emptied that case. No assault style rifles, no high capacity magazines, nobody under twenty one, effective immediately, announced by the chief executive on morning television two weeks after Parkland.
They also said, out loud, that it would cost them customers. That sentence is the whole reason I am writing this.
A stance that costs you nothing is not a stance. It is a press release with better typography.
The last few years trained the industry to produce the cheap version. Pick a cause your customers already agree with. Time it to a month. Change the logo colors, publish the statement, book the earned media, take the applause, ship nothing. I have written those statements. I have sat in the review where somebody asks whether we can get the credit without the exposure, and the honest answer is usually yes, briefly.
What Dick's did is a different transaction. Hunting and firearms is real revenue in that business. Removing it is not a repositioning exercise, it is a line item going away, and the people who ran the numbers knew before the cameras turned on.
Look at Delta the same week. They ended a discount program for NRA members, close to a rounding error commercially, and Georgia legislators promptly stripped a jet fuel tax break worth around forty million dollars. Delta did not choose that price. It got handed to them afterward. Dick's named its own price in advance, which is a meaningfully different act, even if the underlying position looks similar from the outside.
Here is the part that gets lost when this becomes a case study in six months. The credibility does not come from the position. It comes from the receipt. Patagonia suing over Bears Ears in December worked for the same reason. There was a cost, it was legible, and the brand paid it in public.
The credibility does not come from the position. It comes from the receipt.
So the question for anyone walking into a values workshop this spring is not what do we believe. Everybody believes something. The question is what are we willing to put on the invoice, and who has the authority to sign it. If the answer is a social post and a donation matched up to a modest cap, you have a campaign, not a conviction, and your customers can tell the difference faster than your agency can.
Barnaby, meanwhile, has never once paid for anything he believes in.