A 469.7K-view clip tying Dick's Sporting Goods to 113 store closures tore through conservative X this week. Former California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore's Aug. 27 post — 33.2K likes, 4,950 reposts — framed the shrinkage as delayed justice for the 2018 firearms pull. Our index already had a number for that company: 80/100, currently in content review. The receipt is real. The causal story is messier. Shoppers still need a place to buy boots.
What 113 stores actually means
Dick's second-quarter fiscal 2026 results, covering the period ended Aug. 1, 2026, reported 113 store closures across the combined portfolio. That is not a rumor. It is in the company's own store-count tables. As of that date the company said it operated 3,104 locations across the Dick's and Foot Locker businesses.
Here is the part the clip usually skips. Three of those closures sat in the broader Dick's business. One hundred ten sat in the Foot Locker business Dick's acquired and is now pruning. Sixty-seven of the Foot Locker closures were tagged as unproductive-asset review, not a morality play. Dick's also opened stores in the same window — four in the Dick's banners, 27 in Foot Locker banners — while it relocates square footage into House of Sport and Field House concepts.
So no: this is not a clean "they banned rifles, therefore 113 doors went dark" ledger. Foot Locker's mall fleet was already a problem child. Treating every closed lock as a Parkland sermon is how you lose the argument to the first earnings footnote. Treating the 113 as a nothing-burger is how you miss why the clip landed. Americans do not need a spreadsheet to remember who walked away from the hunting counter.
The 2018 decision is still on the receipt
After the 2018 Parkland shooting, Dick's stopped selling assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines and raised the firearms purchase age to 21. It later stripped hunting departments from hundreds of stores, destroyed remaining assault-weapon inventory rather than return it, and sold or shuttered Field & Stream. By 2020, hunting merchandise was confined to a sliver of the chain. That history is documented. It is also why the brand still scores like a culture-war retailer instead of a bait shop.
Our 80/100 score on Dick's is not a vibe. The company took a perfect 100 on the HRC Corporate Equality Index, built out DEI and ESG machinery, and drew conservative-investor heat for putting politics ahead of the counter. Status note: the profile is in content review, not a draft. The number is live enough to shop against. If the 2018 gun policy was supposed to be water under the bridge, the score would have moved. It has not.
Foot Locker, now inside the same corporate tent, scores 30/100 and is published. That gap matters. The parent can close unproductive doors and still own a banner that is not a perfect-100 activist shop. Shoppers should not confuse a mall-fleet cleanup with a values reset at headquarters. The hunting aisle left. The HRC trophy did not.
Go Woke Go Broke is a question, not a hymn
BuyWokeFree does not need to invent a bankruptcy. Radar's Go Woke Go Broke bucket only did 35.4K in seven-day volume this pull. Woke Pulse did 1.1 million. The Dick's clip won because it had a hard number — 113 — attached to a brand people already boycott in their heads. That is the same pattern as Deloitte's $21.5 million DOJ FCA settlement still circulating, and the same pattern as the ESGAUGE finding that 61 of the S&P 100 dumped explicit board-diversity criteria since 2023. Numbers travel. Adjectives die in the replies.
Attribute the viral claim correctly. DeVore and the quote-post army say the firearms virtue signal never paid, and now the store count is paying instead. Dick's management, on the Aug. 25 earnings call, talked about staying the course on Foot Locker, right-sizing unproductive assets, and funding House of Sport. Both can be true in the same quarter: a company can close 113 doors for retail math and still be the company that told hunters to shop somewhere else. Our job is the second sentence. The first one belongs to the 10-Q.
Where the outdoor dollar actually goes
If you used to buy ammo, boots, and youth baseball pants in one big-box run, the replacement ladder is not mysterious. It is sitting in the database.
- Bass Pro Shops scores 0/100 (content review). No documented DEI program, no Pride sponsorship, not on the HRC CEI, 1792 Exchange "Lower Risk." That is the hunting-counter opposite of an Equality 100 Award.
- Academy Sports + Outdoors scores 10/100, published. The entire score is disclosure paperwork. No DEI department, no diversity officer, no representation targets, never HRC-rated. One of the cleanest big-box outdoor banners we have.
- Traeger scores 5/100, published. Pellet grills, not politics. No identifiable DEI program, no Pride/CEI activity, 2024 election marketing that refused to pick a team. If your backyard is the category, this is the unlock.
- Nike still scores 75/100. If the cart is cleats and running shoes inside a Dick's, do not assume the swoosh is the woke-free off-ramp. It is not.
Category pages exist so you do not have to memorize the ladder. Start with Non-Woke Sporting Goods Retail and Non-Woke Hunting and Outdoor Recreation brands. Four to six clicks beat one more quote-post about a chain that already told you its politics.
Score first, narrative second
Saturday's Radar brief called Dick's the best new retail Go Woke Go Broke receipt, and it was right about the engagement. It was also right to flag the brand as content-review 80, not a made-up 100. We will not launder a Foot Locker asset review into a morality play, and we will not pretend an 80 is a 20 because a clip was funny. The 2018 gun decision is on the permanent record. The 113 closures are on the 2026 store table, mostly in a banner Dick's bought. The shopping decision is still downstream of the score.
If Dick's wants the 80 to move, it can retire the HRC hardware, stop confusing ESG decks with customer service, and quit treating the hunting customer as a branding problem. Until then, Bass Pro at 0 and Academy at 10 are not vibes. They are alternatives with SKUs. Corporations can close locations. They cannot close the receipt.