How many openly queer farmers and ranchers are there? Does sexual orientation have any relevancy at tractor supply? I use a co-op most of the time because tsc is overpriced on majority of stuff
I don’t think large-scale farmers are shopping at Tractor Supply. Outside of emergency situations.
However, rural homesteaders suburban “backyard farms” certainly do. And there’s a lot of queer and allied gardeners and backyard farmers.
There are, also, a lot of queer farmers (raises hands emphatically). More than you might think, apparently. I have other options but I have spent a lot of money there because it was convenient - in the same area as a farmer’s market we used to sell at.
It’s funny though how you discount small-scale farms. 89% of farms in the US are considered small-scale.
Not discounting small farms at all. Honestly thought anyone on more than a few acres wouldn’t shop at TSC unless they had to. But I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about that life.
Not surprised there are vastly more small farms than large farms, but what does it look like in terms of acres?
As bad as it sounds (in response to the “more than you might think, apparently”), it’s not as if the stereotypes have much overlap.
Continue never spending a dime there, got it.
Yeah, I’d happily boycott them, but apparently I’m not rural enough to even have one close by.
Still, I wish all those queer farmers the best of luck. Fuck bigots.
This town isn’t massive, but the population is about 60,000 with 100,000 in the metro area so not super rural either- but we still have a TSC. I don’t think it’s about how rural you are.
Yeah this gonna be easy to support
My family literally bought some construction supplies from them a couple of weeks ago. It’s still unused, so we’re taking it back for a refund, and currently boycotting.
These queer farmers
“Got a nice lookin’ crop o’ queer this year, Merle.”
“Yep, plus we got 12 acres o’ weird in the back 40.”
Hell I put 60 dicks in the dirt last Tuesday and the got damn cum beetles eat em up already. Make me so mad, I could spit stead of swaller
Ah shit. The local TS is the only place that reliably stocks the duck feed I use. Other feeds don’t give my birds the exact nutrition they need, and my one bird needs the right nutrition because she’s prone to vitamin issues. -_-
I usually use TSC wood pellets as cat litter since they’re cheap and just break down into sawdust with use. There’s other brands I can shift to, but I’ll pay a bit of a premium for it
I have a small farm supply in my area that makes their own feed and stocks a huge variety of brands. Their house feed is cheaper than TSC and my girls love it.
I only found out about it because I picked up a bunch of pallets to build a coop off of a guy who also raised chickens and we got to talking.
Rural general stores may as well.
I actually just googled “farm stores near me” and found 2 others that are still closed than either of my TSCs.
Local feed store doesn’t sell duck feed. Their “all flock” feed is what I fed my birds until the one got vitamin issues that crippled her. The other local stores closed because the TSCs moved into the area
Can you find it online and set up automatic deliveries? That’s how I get my cat’s hard to find food.
Maybe see if you can figure out their source? Less markup too…
I feel like the smartest thing for a corporation to do when asked about DEI is just to be like “in this economy, we’re focused on the fundamentals of our business”.
Like it or not, DEI is a huge culture war issue. Unless your customer base is almost exclusively on one side, you’re gonna end up alienating a huge portion of them.
Plus it’s not like you get some huge benefit from pushing DEI anyway. The people who like DEI have mostly realized that 99/100 times when a company says they are doing DEI it’s a cynical ploy. That McKinsey study that was supposed to prove DEI is better for business performance has been largely debunked. ESG funds are in full retreat, with many of them struggling to justify their own existence.
If Tractor Supply respectfully demurred when asked to implement DEI in the first place, I’m sure the outrage would be virtually non-existent. Instead they’re in this bud light situation where they’re at risk of alienating both liberals and conservatives.
Source on McKinsey’s research being debunked?
This article basically says correlation isn’t causation. It doesn’t mean DEI is bad for business. The article also doesn’t definitively say McKinsey is wrong. Like I said, it’s just saying that you can’t cause profits by forcing diversity (correlation not causation).
The issue is that you can’t change a corporate culture just by making one hire and naming them VP of DEI. Cultural change takes years (and is the subject of a nauseating amount of HBR articles, which illustrates how many companies fail at cultural change).
Lol why do I ever bother. The only reason people like you ask for sources is so you can nitpick them.
conservatives bullied the company for its inclusive policies for close to three weeks
Ooh, were they bullied for an entire three weeks, during Pride month? Poor babies!
If you don’t shop there to begin with, continuing to not shop there isn’t boycotting.
I’m glad someone has said it… Should be obvious.
So I have to start shopping there before I can boycott it? Sounds counterproductive.
I’ll take up smoking and then give that up!
Well yeah, I’m not a farmer. I don’t need to shop for seeds and tractors and other farmer shit. But if I did I wouldn’t buy it from them. So maybe it’s not a boycott. Call it what you want.
I wonder how many of these companies that choose to participate and welcome diversity, or choose to reject it, do so only for optics and economics. What does Tractor Supply actually believe about the different groups affected by this decision? Do they even care?
They’re a corporation. Of course they don’t care.
Hey, corporations are people, too.
they have feelings!
Probably all of them. Not that I really care. It’s enough that companies are doing the right thing, if they want to secretly do the wrong thing it is their concern. Sincerity is for lovers not for business relationships
If it’s a publicly traded company the answer is that they likely don’t believe in anything. They just do whatever the leadership believes would generate most profit, since that is what shareholders (usually) care about most.
If appearing to support progressive goals gets people to spend money in the store, then that is something that makes sense for a company like this to do. But if they stand to lose more money than they gain, for instance through boycotts, they will drop the pretence pretty quickly.
Personally I see the stance such companies take more like a reflection of general acceptance in society as a whole. If a company promotes progressive values then that would indicate that society as a whole is on average leaning more progressive.
Similarly, if companies stop supporting these values that indicates a worrying trend with regards to societal acceptance.Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that the company itself (as an entity) really believes in anything.
(Note: This doesn’t hold for companies that aren’t publically traded. If there are no stockholders to please the leadership can let their personal view affect the company’s policy quite a bit)
To paraphrase Mark Stanley, corporations only have three rules: get the money, get the money, and get the money.
Don’t think they do things like supporting Pride because they care; it’s only a sign that they want to appeal to the broadest audience possible. But, in that same vein, when they’re supporting a topic is a good sign of is the majority of society’s feelings on the subject.
Polls can be gerrymandered to hell and back, talking heads on the news can make all kinds of claims. But since corporations chase money above all, they spend a lot of money getting very accurate ideas of what our society likes/dislikes.
Think about it. 50, hell even 30 years ago, no corporation worth their salt would have claimed to be in favor of Pride, because it would have been suicidal for the business. Society’s majority take on LGBTQ+ back then ranged from hate and disgust to ‘eww, fine, but not in public!’
Now, corporations fly the Pride flag all over the place. It definitely shows that society is much more supportive of LGBTQ+ and minorities.
ITT: people who dont buy tractors
Tractor Supply sells much more than tractors though
Tractors and tractor accessories?
Even it’s name is a lie
TSC doesn’t sell tractors.
Wow ig I always just assumed. Never actually been inside, just walked by
I’m sure they do, but what is it that they sell that the average lemmy user buys?
Dog food.
Construction stuff for home remodeling.
Pet food.
Pet food, equipment, repair parts, tools, livestock feed if you’re a homesteader or farmer or whatever, they sell lots of different stuff.
They generally have a lot of animal supplies, for pets, farm animals, and wildlife. Food, medicines, etc. Lemmy folks seem to really like animals.
Boots and tools
Dog treats, toys, meds
The one near us has a self serve dog wash. I can take my dogs and use their water, their shampoo, their towels, their dryers, and not have my bathroom covered in dog hair for $10.
They sure do, but it’s all overpriced.
I think you are forgetting that there are a lot of hobby farms that were using TS to get their chickens and feed. Lots of gay hobby farms. These people were the profit margin for TS.
Lots of gay hobby farms.
I know you didn’t mean it that way but I kinda want to see what that would look like.
You’ve never seen a gay hobby horse?
No one ever falls out of the saddle, I don’t know why. Must all be great riders.
They also sell rubber horse stall mats which are way cheaper to buy than actual flooring if you’re building a home gym. There are other places to get horse stall mats though.
To be fair, that’s the case in the VAST majority of Lemmy threads…
If there ever needs to be a ramen boycott, our voices will be heard!
Let me state some basic facts from the perspective of a small farmer. I see here so many odd notions about why TSC’s stance seemingly doesn’t matter much. Too many buy into the stereo type of rural = straight, white, male and that somehow small farms that might tend to shop more at TSC don’t count for much.
- 89% of all farms in the US are small family farms.
- 63.5% of young farmers in the US identify as female, nonbinary or a gender other than cis male. 24.2% identify as a sexuality other than heterosexual. Source: https://www.youngfarmers.org/resource/nationalsurveyreport2022/. Story covering that if you don’t want to signup: https://edgeeffects.net/queer-farmers/
- One in five Gen Zers identify as LGBT
- TSC’s customer demographics - you might be surprised to hear - do actually cover a lot of small-scale farms. This report says they average $43k in farm income and are about 441 acres - I acknowledge they are just taking USDA numbers here and extrapolating but this accords with my own experience as a small farmer. A few of us up here prefer to hit the more specialized ag stores in the Central Valley but the TSC is closer and so for a lot of immediate needs we buy there. I’ve even purchased tractor implements at TSC.
- The stereotype of the rural butch lesbian (hi!) is not without substance. Over 3 million LGBTQIA+ people live in rural areas of the US.
What a moment for the small local agricultural supply stores to get some pub and show their hometown roots over the nameless corporate coprolite that has overtaken an entire nation’s value system.
What local agricultural supply stores? I’m only half joking (I live close to one) but there aren’t a ton left
God fucking damnit. TSC is the closest ag supply to our new play farm. They’re high compared to Rural King or a co-op, but they’re convenient. Fuckers.
I’m lucky that I’m near enough to the central valley in california to have real ag supply stores. They even typically have actual supplies for tractors.
We just bought an old farmhouse in Pennsylvania that still has 9 acres, includes a small orchard and vineyard. My girl wants chickens and rabbits. I’m thinking a couple of steers next spring when I’ve had time to get good fencing up.
I grew up with cattle and worked on a tater farm through highschool.
We mostly just want to produce our own meat. Venison should be much easier.
The apple trees need a lot of TLC as does the vineyard.
I’ll be in the market for a small tractor. As long as it is running, I should be able to fix it up and keep it going.
Best of luck to you. We are on an old homestead and although none of the original buildings remain we did get several 100 year old apple trees. Not great producers (usually every other year is good) but tasty.
Easy, lol.
Yeah sounds about right. All Christianity can do is bully.
