While everyone else on the conservative side of the blogosphere today is marveling over the concurrent train wreck of the Biden-Trump “debate” last night, and the “deer in the headlights” reaction from the Establishment Media over their horrible realization that they can’t possibly pull any kind of media veil over the wreckage – I just thought that I might wander off on another tangent. I’ll meditate and marvel a little on there on how a national retail corporation pulled decisively back from the brink of a Bud Light-like, company-wrecking disaster. I speak of the Tractor Supply turn-around. I should like to have been eavesdropping in the C-level suite of Tractor Supply’s headquarters, when everyone concerned there realized that going all out for progressive causes like DEI/DIE, the Pride Mafia and open borders was about as popular with their rural and suburban fly-over country market demographic as a case of genital warts. I would assume that the meeting where they realized “Oh-krep-on-a-biscuit-we-gotta put a stop to it now before we lose our phony-baloney jobs!” was pretty epic.
All props for even coming to that realization, and another round of props for acting decisively in putting out a statement strongly emphasizing action steps, instead of one of those sniveling and mealy-mouthed ‘we’re-so-sorry-that-you-stupid-proles-were-offended’ non-apology apologies. The current retail and entertainment landscape is littered with the still-twitching corpses of entities who went all in for DEI/DIE, the glories of randy Pride parades and free-lance gender-bending, and expecting their customers/audience to sit still for wokie lectures. In the future – if university marketing courses even have a future – likely there will be a couple of compare-contrast chapters on how Bud Light and Tractor Supply handled the fiasco resulting from dissing their customers.
For myself, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed about rolling up to a Tractor Supply store, or any other local feed and seed outlet driving a small sedan. One really ought to be in a slightly battered not-quite-new pickup truck with a layer of dirt on the paint and mud on the tires. While I don’t live on a ranch or farm, we have kept chickens in the past, and the spoiled avians preferred chowing down on the brand available there. They also have a pretty good array of pet foods, deer corn, sundry dry goods and work clothing, garden and outdoor items and country kitsch. We’ve bought a chicken coop there, a dog crate, plants, seeds and large-capacity mason jars for home canning … and when we start with chickens again, we might just go regularly again.
Still, though – there are independent, non-chain farm and ranch supply stores, and genuine old-style feed stores around here. Like this one, or this one. Or this small local chain, which has an outlet just up the road from us.
Had an interesting small discussion on Facebook about a WSJ article yesterday. The gist of it was that the hard progressive stance at Ben and Jerry’s hasn’t hurt them a bit.
I compared this to Bud Lite (and does anyone know if they have recouped much of their customer base? All is quiet).
Someone made the point that their base has known about their politics for years. and their politics fits with a lot of that from the base.
Bud lite really angered their base.
Maybe it all comes down to the customer base.
Then you have large corporations like Target with a mixed base that angered a sizable portion. I’ve read that their sales have been down for some time.
As far as Ben & Jerry’s, they baked that “groovy”, counter-culture vibe into their image from day 1 as evidenced by “Cherry Garcia.” I don’t think anyone thought twice that they have a Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Fallon-themed flavor but not a Greg Gutfeld. They have taken a more confrontational side with climate-change and then the banning of sales in Judea & Samaria, but that still coincides with their key market and even with that new edge I see no diminution in shelf space
To SGTM’s point, it’s about corporate response. It’s not surprising the Mulvaney caught the Bud Light people by surprise; they have been micro-targeting the LGBT Alphabet People for years with Pride-themed marketing material for receptive bars and other establishments. The image that kept being associated with the boycott was a picture of Mulvaney holding a can with his image imprinted on it, but those cans were never produced for the market. What happened was that not only were the marketing people dismissive of their core market and therefore slow to recognize the danger, but they had trapped themselves with their previous efforts because any backing-off the Mulvaney endorsements entailed alienating the Alphabet People.
I think the boycott worked out well, sending a clear message, and the Tractor Supply situation was a direct response to it. Provides a foundation to build on which is important because that mentality is still prevalent in corporate America; it may be chastened but it still exists, ready to re-emerge like a viral plague.
Personally I think we should ask everyone to do away with Pride-themed bonanza and all that, after all don’t they just want to be accepted like everyone else? Why do they need to be set apart? Seems discriminatory. Accordingly I think we should be fair and have public “celebrations” for other parts of our rich cultural stew, such as Lent with themed merchandise sold in stores, banners to hang from public establishments, and demands that all eating establishments offer fish and other Lenten-friendly meals on Fridays. I cannot wait to see the Bud Light cans. What they won’t? Bigots.
Cannot wait for “Bill of Rights Pride Month”, especially the merchandise celebrating the 2nd Amendment. Every Democrat and corporation better be celebrating that too, with “pride” parades and floats for each of the ten amendments, after all that’s my truth. Anybody who won’t celebrate should be accused of being an insurrectionist.
Leveraging what Mike said above, perhaps it’s time the government stop recognizing demographics with official proclamations. Stop recognizing Pride Month, and Black History Month, and Asian-American Month, etc. Just get out of that. Not a function of government. In some parts of the government (especially the military), such recognition also includes mandatory, all-hands briefings and struggle sessions.
Similarly, stop proclaiming “days.” We don’t need the feds proclaiming National BBQ Potato Chip Day.
Yeah, it looks like doing things that anger your base customers is now going to have consequences. I’m glad the pushback happened. And worked.
We don’t have TSC in Flyover Falls, in Deepest Oregon, but the two regional farm and ranch supply outfits will happily take money from people in the newest Honda Civic to the grungiest F350 with loaded horse trailer. (Said load containing cattle…) One has a somewhat more urban-garden section, while the other has a really good camping/hunting/shooting section, but there’s a lot of overlap.
I have noticed a new ad series by Black Rock, the investment fund that was all in on ESG for a while. ESG was the corporate equivalent of DEI. Everything was to be “green” and “sustainable.” The returns on those investments sucked and somebody noticed.
Tractor Supply:
LGBTQIA+ training for employees
* Funding pride/drag events
* They have a DEI Council
* Funding sex changes
* Climate change activism
* Pride month decorations in the office
* DEI hiring practices
* LGBTQIA+ events at work
It’s not that they just “went woke”. They’ve been woke for years. Do I believe they’re going to change course?
No.
Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru
I doubt that the Woke people ever constituted a big part of their customer base. As such, it was unnecessary or counterproductive to pander to the Wokesters.
Here’s an article that maybe starts to explain how we got here.
https://archive.is/woefd
Bad “research” isn’t just for science.
That McKinsey report is interesting. I’m not a big fan of consultants; it’s not that they outright lie but rather what they say is shaded by implicit boundaries. He article points to all sorts of problems typical of consultants, the big one being the correlation/causal. I’m going to guess that this report wasn’t commissioned by a client, but rather was used by McKinsey to make a market for diversity consulting services.
From my experience, consultants feed on the insecurities of management, especially when it comes to risk management which manifests in 2 ways. First there is the risk to both the company and c-level suite reputation of being left out of the next big thing; think the buzzword bingo of business reengineering or Internet in the 1990s or Net Zero/Climate Change/Green. Just watch ads for companies and listen to how they try and describe themselves.
If you’re a CEO you don’t want to be caught short of the hot new thing; I know I don’t want an article in the WSJ asking if my company is the next Blockbuster of the 2020s. The other risk is more of legal protection. You don’t want either the PR or financial hit of legal action on some toxic issue. Maybe it’s pollution. Keep in mind while BLM had yet to fully gear up by the time of this report (2015), MeToo was hitting its stride. Ending up in legal action, the courts will look in part to see if your company had engaged in “common practice(s)” regarding the issue say by setting up policies to fight discriminatory practices and harassment. If you don’t have basic policies in place and you are up on sexual harassment, good luck. I would imagine when MeToo started to hit the headlines, a lot of corporations panicked, realized their risk and looked to call “Ghostbusters”… and there was McKinsey with their groundbreaking report waiting to scoop up business.
You can imagine how it went from there, the CEO called the C-level folks in, asked what they were doing to protect the company on this matter and somebody suggested setting up a dedicated DEI office within HR, afterall wasn’t HR already staffed from bitter left-wingers? In other words for business leaders it was about risk management, making the problem manageable and much like the Aztecs did with the Sun Gods, by offering a sacrifice to the Gods of Diversity with hiring practices and training seminars.
Alot of money was made, by consultants and otherwise unemployable internal diversity managers. It’s a protection racket and for corporations it is initially seen as a cost of doing business, just like working with unions or Chicago Machine.
You can rest assured that anything McKinsey puts out, especially for free, is because McKinsey thinks it will make them money. The same for what they put out for pay. As long as the check clears, they’re on to the next sucker. It only needs to sound vaguely plausible, if the management had a clue, they wouldn’t be there in the first place.
I rather think that Mike has the right of it – that corporations wanted to armor themselves against Me Too/BLM, etc., and were rushed into setting up such programs … and now, they are receiving the blow-back.
For me, personally – when we take up backyard chickens again, we’ll make an effort to do business with Jupe Mills, or Struttys – even make the trip all the way to New Braunfels, to the local feed’n’seed there. Not because we’re such fans of Tractor Supply – but we want to support local, first and foremost, rather than a national corporation.
It was a point that my daughter made, when we drove up to Bandera this week, to meet a new client. During the height of the Covidiocy, when it was “Close All The Things!”, it was the small towns out in the backwaters who weren’t having any of it – bars, restaurants and shops were defiantly open, because it was a matter of economic survival to stay open. They were far enough out in the country that they could ignore the authorities insisting on the Covidiocy’s stupid and counterproductive rules.
A couple of recent books address the issue of Woke corporations and their suicidal advertising campaigns as manifestations of the managerial state, first described by James Burnham in his “The Managerial Revolution,” published in 1941. One is “The Total State” by Auron Macintyre. According to Macintyre, the managerial elite alluded to by Burnham and others before him are now calling the shots and consider advertising campaigns more a vehicle for virtue signaling than selling products. If they damage a company in the process they don’t really care, because their expertise is in management. They can manage one company as well as another and can just jump ship to another host if things get too bad.
The other book, “Woke, Inc.”, is by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. As CEO of a Pharma company, he gained a lot of insight into the symbiotic relationship of corporations and Woke NGO’s. His insight is that corporations pose as champions of assorted Woke moral crusades. For this the Woke outfits certify them as morally pure. In return, the corporations supply the Woke grifters with fat donations. He describes Wokism as a secular religious movement similar to Communism. I agree. The Woke are basically the same people who would have been ardent Communists in the 30’s and 40’s.
Classic workers vs. bourgeoisie Communism is now basically defunct as a compelling ideology for would be saviors of the world. Wokism is currently the leading candidate to take its place. It is certainly threadbare enough as secular religions go. It lacks anything close to the theoretical underpinning of Marxism and consists of a hodgepodge of moral truisms that are concocted on virtually a daily basis out of thin air. The interesting thing about Woke morality is that it lacks any source of moral authority whatever. It supports its claims purely by appealing to the moral emotions of its followers. It’s certainly annoying enough, but I doubt it will ever have the ideological heft to kill anything close to the 100 million victims of
Communism. Perhaps we should be grateful for that.