The retail industry has been taking a fair bit of heat lately for various businesses that have decided to take a stand against guns. Traditional brands from Dick’s Sporting Goods to Walmart to Levi are making themselves heard by sharing their concerns — and emptying their shelves.
Several of these brands have even gone so far as to block sales of certain types of weapons or add frustrating requirements before you can make a purchase of particular firearms. Shopify, one of the country’s most popular online shopping cart software platforms, caused a ruckus in 2018 when they randomly shut down the selling websites of several gun stores without prior notice.
Salesforce is the latest software company to jump on the anti-gun bandwagon, blocking retailers that are using their best-in-class sales software from selling guns.
Banning Sales of “Military-Style” Rifles
The team at Salesforce is being incredibly specific in their requirements for selling: they’re telling retailers to stop selling military-style rifles — or stop using their selling software. Implementing Salesforce and paying the licensing fees is an expensive project, and this move could leave retailers with a great deal of software overhead while still being unable to use the software to sell some of their primary products.
Salesforce is used to manage sales, customer orders, and inventory. It is the basis for sales operations for millions of businesses throughout the world. Having to find another platform to use on short notice would cause serious financial and operational distress to these organizations, something that Salesforce leadership seems to be banking on.
Corporate-Policy Virtue Signaling
Like Shopify, Salesforce is not exactly a household name unless you are familiar with order management or customer relationship software. Both of these platforms own a significant portion of the market: Salesforce has more than 40,000 employees and a market cap of $120 billion.
Leveraging this power to create a negative environment for some business owners that would be forced to either switch software packages or stop selling particular weapons is believed to be a discriminatory practice against weapons retailers — who are also protected under the Second Amendment. This type of corporate-policy virtue signaling is not unexpected in today’s marketplace but is causing ongoing problems for gun retailers and buyers.
Making an Expensive Change
Some businesses, such as Camping World, are being faced with millions of dollars in software charges, retraining of their staff and data migration if they are unable to come to a consensus with Salesforce. The platform is integral to the operations of the business, but Salesforce is so far staying strong with their requirement that Camping World and other retailers remove military-style weapons from their offerings. A software switch of this magnitude would take months if not years, and would have an extremely negative impact on the retailer, their customers and their staff members.
Organizations such as Salesforce are able to get away with this type of egregious behavior because people are not actively working against brands as they make these anti-gun decisions.
The only way to protect Second Amendment rights for all Americans is to ensure that this type of political gerrymandering by liberals is no longer acceptable to the people who are paying their bills.
~ Firearm Daily
