Dick’s Sporting Goods announced Tuesday it will remove firearms from 125 of its stores. The move follows the company’s ban on assault-style weapons last year in the wake of the Parkland school shooting.
CEO Ed Stack said today that Dick’s will pull hunting gear from 125 stores starting in around August in response to its slumping sales in those stores, a move that may spread to more stores next year.
Dick’s last year announced it would ban sales of assault-style weapons after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting and revelations that its shooter, Nikolas Cruz, had purchased a gun from a Dick’s store.
Cruz murdered 17 people in the worst domestic school shooting in history.
The company also halted sales of high-capacity magazines and guns to anyone under 21 years old.
Hunting products started vanishing from 10 Dick’s stores last fall as the retailer swapped those items for products such as kayaks and baseball gear.
Stack said the stores saw higher sales, margins and foot traffic than when they had guns.
Halting assault-style weapon sales put a dent in overall sales for Dick’s, the company noted last fall, a dip furthered by a weaker gun market.
On Tuesday, the Pittsburgh-area company said net income for the quarter fell to $102.6 million from $116 million in the year-earlier period, per MarketWatch.
Adjusted same-store sales fell 3.1 percent over a 12-month period ending Feb. 2 when compared to that period the year prior.
Dick’s operates 729 stores along with 94 Golf Galaxy stores and 35 Field and Stream stores.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation expelled Dick’s from membership last year for “conduct detrimental” to the firearms trade group, but Stack remains undeterred in the company’s direction.
“If we had a mulligan, we’d do it all over again,” Stack said.
Stack, along with a handful of other CEOs, signed onto a letter sent to Congress in support of the HR8 background check bill.
Background checks are something “both sides of the aisle can get behind it,” Stack said.
He’s also recently joined Everytown Business Leaders for Gun Safety, arguing for gun safety across the U.S. And Dick’s Sporting Goods continues to invest in Sports Matter, a business it created to fund youth sports teams.
“To be successful, brands have to be interesting and they have to be interested,” Stack said. “I think we’re both. … We’re interested in the well being of our kids.”