by Ed Stack
A day later, O. F. Mossberg & Sons, makers of shotguns, announced they would not supply us, either. “Make no mistake, Mossberg is a staunch supporter of the U.S. Constitution and our Second Amendment rights,” Iver Mossberg, the company’s CEO, said in a statement, “and we fully disagree with Dick’s Sporting Goods’ recent anti–Second Amendment actions.”
I did not take any of this personally. If we got our way on assault-style rifles, these companies would lose an important stream of revenue. Then again, they gave up another significant revenue stream by cutting us off, because we’d been one of the top three or four firearms retailers in the country for years; they sold a lot of guns through Dick’s. But it was their call to make. We never asked them to change their minds.
But we did invite them to Pittsburgh, along with other gun manufacturers, to talk about our position. Some declined to even speak with me. Others talked with me on the phone but made it clear that they wouldn’t meet in person. The CEOs at Mossberg and Sturm, Ruger sent me emails indicating that we had nothing to discuss. But some made the trip—I won’t name names—and we met in a conference room at the Store Support Center to hash things out.
They shared their point of view, sometimes forcefully, but they were absolute gentlemen. They agreed that the country has a gun problem and that it needs a solution. My sense was that none knew what that might be, but whatever it was, it had to come in baby steps, and they felt we’d tried to do too much, too quickly. Bottom line, they said we should return assault-style rifles to the shelves and that we owed gun makers an apology. We weren’t about to do any of that, so at meeting’s end we agreed to disagree. I give the guys who came a lot of credit. It was gutsy.
We made another decision that enraged many in the gun rights fraternity. It struck us as hypocritical to return all the MSRs we had in stock to the manufacturers, because that would simply put them back on the market to sell through different hands. We believed these rifles should be off the street. So after brief debate, we decided that the only way to make sure the rifles were gone for good was to destroy them and eat the cost. Which would be substantial: we had roughly $5 million worth of inventory.
That’s what we did. We sawed $5 million worth of rifles into pieces, then turned the scrap over to a metal recycler. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade organization that came up with the “modern sporting rifle” moniker, expelled us from membership. The response from other gun people was surreal. Some acted as if we’d killed their best friends. Seriously: I got notes from people that read as if the rifles were people. “What a waste,” the NRA lamented, “and what a strange business model.”
All of this was prelude. We knew we’d take a financial hit, and a big one; experience told us as much. And indeed, in the first quarter of 2018, our comp sales were down about 2.5 percent from the same period a year before. Our second-quarter comp sales fell dramatically, by 4 percent, and third-quarter by 3.9 percent. Although this was significant, it was pretty much what we’d expected.
But as I wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, there were principles at stake. “This issue transcends our company’s bottom line,” the column read. “We suspected that speaking out would have a negative impact on our business. But this was about our values and standing up for what we think is right.
“A group of us in corporate America have taken a stand, made hard choices and enacted reforms on our own because we firmly believe it’s the right thing to do for our kids and for our country. The kids in Florida and across the nation have taken a stand and been brave enough to make their voices heard. The majority of Americans are demanding that members of Congress take a stand and be brave enough to do their jobs.”
We’d been mulling how we should position our hunting category in a post-Parkland landscape and whether it might be time to reduce its importance. About 30 percent of the chain—and by early 2018, we had 732 Dick’s stores, with another eight about to open—did very well in firearms; it’s a regional business. It might make sense, we thought, to concentrate our firearms sales in those markets and look at reducing or phasing out the category elsewhere.
So eight months after Parkland, in October 2018, we launched an experiment. We removed guns from ten Dick’s stores in markets where hunting didn’t move the needle. We replaced them with a range and depth of other merchandise that we judged to be particularly suited to each place. In Boston, for instance, we doubled down on outerwear, licensed merchandise, and baseball gear. In a couple of Florida stores we enlarged baseball, saltwater fishing tackle, and athletic apparel.
We’d always customized our selection by region, but here we were sharpening our focus to an almost bespoke selection by individual store. The results were a pleasant surprise. Those ten stores did extremely well, significantly outpacing the other stores in their regions. So, encouraged, we planned to reallocate the gun space in another 125 stores in 2019, and to likewise localize the assortment in each. Our fallout with the gun industry might turn out to be a blessing.
Our long history of supplying hunters is something we’re proud of at Dick’s, and I don’t think we’d ever want to stop it altogether. But I can see the day coming when we sell guns in only a fraction of our locations. And it’s a safe bet that we will trade exclusively in those weapons designed for real sport. As for Field & Stream, we’re studying ways we might tweak the formula to better serve outdoors enthusiasts who don’t hunt.
I thought about my dad a lot while we struggled over the MSR issue. I wondered what Dick Stack would have made of the controversy. On the one hand, I imagine he’d have been panicked that we took such a public stand; after all, he wasn’t much of a risk-taker after Hillcrest, and I think he would have freaked out that we’d alienated customers and vendors, let alone lost some revenue.
But I think he’d also be proud. He set our corporate example of marrying what we do to the communities we serve—it all started with his leading the drive to improve Little League in Binghamton. Plus, he was a principled guy who would approve of our trying to save lives, and while we have no way of measuring such a thing, we believe that our policy on raising the age for all gun purchases has done that. And though he was the consummate salesman, and able to win over virtually anyone who walked through the door, I think he would have agreed that you can’t please everyone—and that we can’t let the potential loss of some disgruntled customers rewrite the philosophy that guides us.
And really, that’s what this entire experience comes down to. These were our decisions, about how to run our business, based on our company’s conscience. I’m confident that in his two-fisted, suffer-no-malarkey style, my dad would have done the same thing, and that neither market forces, nor threats, nor ugly e-mails, nor boycotts would have dislodged him from the course he judged to be right.
I don’t think he would have needed a guarantee of success to proceed, either. We certainly didn’t know whether we’d get Congress to act when we took up the MSR issue, and to date, it hasn’t happened in any satisfying way. But you know what? Gun sales were down nationally in 2018. On Black Friday that year, traditionally a huge day for gun purchases, the FBI’s NICS background check program received 182,093 queries. That was down from 203,086 a year before, and down from the two previous years, too.
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This is a fascinating time to be in retail. With Amazon and many brands going direct-to-consumer via the Internet, the industry is in a state of serious upheaval. Everybody now walks around with a store in his or her pocket—a whole range of competing stores, actually—and as we all sell similar products, our challenge at Dick’s is to work out the logistics of making our selection easy to access, purchases a snap to make, and delivery fast and cheap—all while, at the same time, differentiating ourselves from the other guys.
Our brands are key to that differentiation. We carry a larger selection of top-quality brands than anyone. We carry a greater selection within those brands, too. As we saw retail going through consolidation,
we realized we had to preserve that—and that our survival depended in part on making ourselves as important to our vendors and brands as they were, and are, to us. We had to be more important to Nike, Callaway, and Under Armour than department stores and smaller bricks-and-mortar retailers were, and ultimately, than Amazon was. If a customer asked Callaway where she should buy her clubs, we wanted them to answer, “Dick’s.” And in return, we’d hold them up to our customers as something really special.
We’ve always cultivated win-win relationships with our brands. When Kevin Plank was just getting Under Armour started, I remember walking through one of our stores with him, talking about how we could help each other grow. We continued the conversation in his office in Baltimore, and the agreement that emerged from those talks was that we’d always treat each other unfairly. This guided our relationship for better than a decade. We provided Under Armour with key space in our stores, included them in a lot of our marketing, and helped them test new products they wanted to bring to market. They invested in fixtures and marketing for us, created exclusive products for us, and put their own employees on-site to ensure that the presentation of their product was perfect.
We’ve since formalized these sorts of relationships. A few years ago, we realized we needed to reduce the number of brands we carried—we had too many brands offering similar merchandise. So we established a new set of terms and conditions under which we would do business with them. We created strategic partnerships with brands such as Nike and Callaway. We’d overtly move market share to them—we’d put their product on the endcaps and in our power aisles, where they’d be impossible to miss by anyone walking into our stores. We’d market their product and, in many cases, put a team together to focus exclusively on their business. In return, they’d provide us with certain advantages—such as offering exclusive products or shoe color combinations sold nowhere else, and co-investing in marketing campaigns. They often supply fixtures that create an in-store environment for their products.
These strategic partnerships are important to us. We’re truly in this together. To drive that home, and preserve the special character of these pairings, we have no more than two in each category. In footwear and apparel, it’s Nike. We have strategic partnerships with the North Face, and with Yeti, and with others, too.
Callaway is a great example. Within four months of becoming our strategic partner, Callaway was our number-one golf ball brand. They introduced their Chrome Soft, “the ball that changed the ball,” through Dick’s. They debuted their Tru-VisTruvis ball, which is painted like a soccer ball, in our golf departments, and we were aggressive about marketing and merchandising it.
Bruce Parker would probably keel over if he saw how well we work together. Callaway even came to us and said they wanted to get involved in our Sports Matter initiative. They created a green-and-white Sports Matter Truvis ball. Two dollars from the sale of each dozen go to the Dick’s Sporting Goods Foundation. Last year, we sold more than two hundred thousand dozens of those balls. That’s a real partnership.
For every brand that we form such a bond with, there are many that we don’t. The majority of our suppliers have a more standard transactional relationship with us, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. We get along well and work together, but we don’t see their success as foundational to ours, and they don’t consider our health as necessary to their own. Both sides have less invested in the partnership.
Still, all of our brands are important to us, and that won’t change. Beyond that, I can’t predict what the future holds. You’ll hear some retailers lament that things aren’t as they were five or ten years ago. I don’t bother. Those days are gone. The sooner you grasp that, I figure, the sooner you can get to adapting.
We’re up for it. We’ll adapt as we need to. In the meantime, we’ll strive to set ourselves apart by doing what we’ve always prided ourselves on: whether virtually or in person, we’ll offer great customer service and top-quality gear, and we’ll do it at a good price. My dad might feel lost in the uncertain and fast-changing retail environment of today, but he’d get that part.
* * *
So here we are, a really large company. As I write this, Dick’s is closing in on 750 stores in 47 states. Plus, we run 94 Golf Galaxy stores and 35 Field & Stream stores. Our sales are approaching $9 billion per year. We’ve reached the point where only three brands we do business with are bigger than we are—Nike, Adidas, and VF Corporation, which makes Vans, Smartwool, the North Face, JanSport, and a lot of other outdoors brands. I never imagined such a day when I was arguing with my dad over getting popular sneakers in the Court Street store.
But then, that might be the least of the surprises since then. Last year I marked the fiftieth anniversary of my first day’s work at Dick’s as a thirteen-year-old, a kid who most desperately wanted to be anywhere but there, in the store my dad had started twenty years before. In a few months I’ll reach a milestone in my long career at Dick’s: the point at which I’ll have run the business for as long as my dad did. Thirty-six years.
I did not foresee, in 1984, that we’d become national advocates for youth sports and team play, or involve ourselves in helping underfunded athletic programs, or get into the movie business. I certainly didn’t expect that we’d become a flashpoint in the national debate about gun safety. There’s so much I didn’t imagine, couldn’t imagine, that has come to pass.
In most respects, Dick’s bears little resemblance to our humble operation in Binghamton and Vestal. When I took over the company, our floor space totaled twenty-one thousand square feet, and that was after we moved into the old Acme building. That’s less than half of the retail area in any one of our Dick’s or Field & Stream locations today, and smaller than many of our Golf Galaxy stores. Just in terms of physical footprint, we’re two thousand times bigger.
Overseeing all that space has required our ranks to grow from twenty people to a workforce of more than forty thousand, with expertise not only in the products we sell but in complex logistics, social media marketing, nutrition, government affairs. Keeping all those stores filled with merchandise has required us to expand our warehouse from the tiny prefab shed out back of Court Street to a chain of immense distribution centers stretching across the country.
One thing that’s remained the same: I still get out to visit our stores as often as I can. I learn something important on every trip. And a few familiar faces remain at the company. Larry Schorr is still a key player, as he has been since we bought the company from my dad. He’s been instrumental in guiding us through many tough decisions and a confidant of mine through good times and bad. Today, he’s the lead director on our board—the only remaining director, besides me, from the informal group I assembled in 1984.
Bill Colombo remains on the board, as well. Of all the gifts that my college education gave me, his friendship has turned out to be the best and most important. Dick’s would not be the company it is today without Bill’s wonderful smarts and skills.
Tim Myers has held a dozen different jobs at Dick’s over the years. Today, he’s the company’s liaison for the Dick’s Open: he travels the country talking to golf pros, convincing them to play at the annual tournament in Binghamton, which is still held at the golf course I often played with Gramp. He and my sister Kim still live in the Triple Cities, a few minutes’ drive from Court Street. Kim ran for Congress in 2016 in New York’s Twenty-Second District, and lost what turned out to be a hotly contested three-way race. Her politics and mine don’t have a tremendous area of overlap, but I thought she’d have been a first-class member of the House and a great voice for the people of the Southern Tier.
Her campaign literature included a short biography. “I grew up working with my dad and my siblings in my family’s business, Dick’s Clothing and Sporting Goods,” it read, “running the cash register, filing gun records and stocking shelves. That is where I learned the values of hard work, integrity, determination and giving back to my community.” Ame
n to that.
A piece of the company’s heart remains in Binghamton, and I imagine it always will. Store Number 1, in the old Acme, is by far the smallest Dick’s in the chain, but it does very well, considering. Across the parking lot stands 345 Court Street, which is hallowed ground within Dick’s. It’s empty at the moment, but we have plans for the place. We’re going to do something interesting there to commemorate the company’s story.
We’ve tried to share our success with our hometown. A few years ago we realized that we needed another distribution center, the biggest of the bunch, to better service the Northeast and our growing e-commerce traffic. Our logistics group considered a number of attractive locations, but I wanted to build it in Binghamton. It opened last year in Conklin, just southeast of town and less than a mile from the first distribution center we built back in 1990, with a first-phase footprint of 650,000 square feet, employing more than two hundred people. We’re in the process of expanding it to just shy of a million square feet, at which point nearly five hundred people will work there. It thrilled me to be there on opening day.
We transplanted a little of Binghamton when we built our new headquarters in Pittsburgh, too. We built the road into the property, and the city told us we could give it any name, and the building any address, that we wanted. That was easy. The Store Support Center is located at 345 Court Street. And if you visit the food court inside, you’ll find the individual stations bear familiar names—Annie’s Pizza Kitchen, named for my mom’s mom; the Oakridge Grill, named for the street where my dad built his house; and Dutch’s Deli, named for Gramp. The sit-down restaurant is called the McNamara Grill, after the South Side Binghamton street on which both of my parents grew up.
And there’s a little reminder of home in our nearly eight hundred stores. Walk into any Dick’s, and you’ll find a big print on the wall, that picture of my dad and my uncle Ed standing in the original Dick’s Bait and Tackle. My dad barely out of his teens. The inventory sparse. The store almost unimaginably snug around them.