Businesses rushing to placate the Left would do well to run some numbers first

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air makes the case that corporate grandstanding on the social cause du jour leaves good money - that which would be spent by a prospective swath of their customer bases - on the table. The situation in question is Walmart and Dick's Sporting Goods changing their rifle-selling policies:

When you decide to drop a particular model of firearm or raise the minimum purchase age in response to demands from Democrats and liberal organizations, you’re not really making a significant change to your offerings. You’re making an obvious and biased political statement. Historically, this is bad news for the company’s bottom line.

[Business Insider writer Josh] Barro is basing his argument on the premise that younger consumers tend to skew more to the left in significant numbers. While that’s actually a regional phenomenon which national brands need to handle at the local level, overall it’s a fairly accurate statement. But how heavy is the tilt? Let’s say it’s as warped as 70/30 liberal (which is preposterous). So as a corporation, you’ve now dropped yourself in the middle of a political fight, putting all your chips on blue. That leaves one very pertinent question which every business has to face unanswered:

Can any company really afford to lose 30% of their traffic in a competitive climate?

If you have to think about that one for more than two seconds you’ve never operated a business. This is the same problem that plagues Hollywood every time they invest heavily in a tilted political screed like Miss Sloane. You immediately tick off the portion of your potential pool of consumers who take the other position. Barro is treating this proposition as an either/or decision. The company either tilts left or it tilts right. That’s a false choice. The third, and by far more preferable option is to not tilt at all. Ignore the tempting bait of the 24-hour news cycle and focus on providing the best goods and services possible which might appeal to everyone. 

Dick’s Sporting Goods may have just sent a positive, uplifting message to the most liberal wing of the “woke” public. But they also just angered a lot of potential customers as well. People on the left who weren’t already in the market for the types of products Dick’s sells aren’t suddenly going to start rushing in there to purchase camping equipment. But conservatives who do buy such things may be thinking of going down the road and doing their shopping elsewhere.

Walmart, Dick's Sporting Goods, and all the film-industry entities strongly indicating they'll pull projects out of Georgia if it passes a religious-freedom bill need to get back to Milton Friedman's basic truth: a business has one responsibility, which is to show a return on investment to its owners.

But that's not going to happen in post-America.