Home Depot spent the entire month of July 2026 under a nationwide 31-day boycott. The reason it was boycotted is the part most people get backwards: not for embracing DEI, but for quietly deleting it.
The company scores 56/100 on the BuyWokeFree index — Home Depot sits squarely in "woke" territory, and deleting a webpage did not move that number one point. Here is why, and where to shop instead.
What Home Depot Actually Did
Home Depot's dedicated diversity, equity and inclusion page — live on its corporate site for years — quietly disappeared. In its place sits a rebranded page called "WeAreTHD" that contains no reference to diversity, equity, or inclusion at all. No press release. No announcement. No explanation. Just a URL that stopped resolving to what it used to say.
The People's Union USA, a group that organizes consumer "economic blackouts," noticed. Founder John Schwartz accused the retailer of having "quietly erased their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion page, as if standing for fairness or for equality or for representation, was something to be ashamed of," and called for a full-month boycott running through July. Home Depot was targeted alongside Amazon (100/100) and Starbucks (100/100) — the same July action, three logos.
Separately, Home Depot parking lots became flashpoints in immigration enforcement coverage through the summer, producing a second, unrelated stream of protest activity at stores in Los Angeles and Chicago. Home Depot has denied coordinating with federal enforcement. Two different fights, one orange apron.
Why Deleting the Page Didn't Change the Score
This is the whole reason the BuyWokeFree index exists. A woke score is not a measure of what a company's website says this week. It is a measure of what a company funded, mandated, and institutionalized — and those things do not get deleted when a webpage does.
Home Depot's 56 rests on a record, not a landing page: hosting white-privilege training for employees, adopting Pride branding across its corporate identity, and rolling out BLM-branded aprons in stores. That is a company that spent years steering hard away from the plainly conservative customer base that built it into a $355 billion retailer. A 404 does not refund any of it.
So when the activist left saw the page vanish and called it a betrayal, and the right saw the same deletion and called it a win — both were reading a URL instead of a ledger. The ledger says 56.
Home Depot vs. Lowe's: Pick Your Shade of Orange
The obvious question for anyone standing in a driveway with a broken water heater is: fine, where else? The reflexive answer is the other big-box chain. Check the number first.
- Lowe's — 64/100 (woke). Under CEO Marvin Ellison, Lowe's committed $55 million to women- and minority-owned enterprises and built out programming around it. It scores eight points worse than the company being boycotted.
- Home Depot — 56/100 (woke). The one under boycott. Still woke. Still not your ally.
Switching from Home Depot to Lowe's is not a boycott. It is a lateral move into a slightly deeper end of the same pool. If the goal is to stop funding corporate activism, crossing the parking lot accomplishes nothing.
The Woke-Free Alternative: Tractor Supply at 10/100
There is exactly one household-name chain in this space that actually changed, and it is not a big-box home improvement store.
Tractor Supply scores 10/100 — the lowest score of any major retailer in the category, and one of the lowest in our entire database of 2,400+ brands.
In June 2024, after a public campaign led by activist Robby Starbuck, Tractor Supply became the first Fortune 300 company to roll the whole thing back at once: it eliminated its DEI roles outright, withdrew its carbon-emission goals, ended sponsorship of Pride events, stopped its voting-initiative funding, and cut off data-sharing with the Human Rights Campaign. It did not quietly retitle a webpage. It published a letter, named the changes, and absorbed the backlash — including employee resignations and weeks of national coverage.
That is the difference between a rebrand and a reversal, and it is exactly what the six-criteria scoring is built to detect. Home Depot: 56. Tractor Supply: 10. Same industry, same customer, same year — a 46-point gap.
The Pattern Across the Whole Board
Home Depot is not an isolated case in 2026. It is the template. Look at where the rest of American retail actually sits:
- Amazon — 100/100, extremely woke
- Starbucks — 100/100, extremely woke
- Walmart — 90/100, extremely woke, despite its own late-2024 DEI rollback headlines
- Target — 71/100, extremely woke, and boycotted from both directions in the same eighteen months
- Lowe's — 64/100, woke
- Home Depot — 56/100, woke
- Tractor Supply — 10/100, the outlier
Walmart is the tell. It announced a DEI rollback, generated a week of approving headlines, and still scores 90 — because years of ESG reporting and a $100 million racial-equity commitment do not evaporate because a press cycle ended. Announcements are cheap. Money already spent is permanent.
What This Costs Companies
The reason any of this matters commercially is that consumers have proven they will actually leave. Bud Light — 45/100 — remains the standing proof of concept, having shed roughly 26% of its U.S. sales after its 2023 controversy and never fully recovering the shelf position it lost.
What Home Depot's July demonstrates is the trap on the other side. Try to please everyone by deleting the evidence and you end up boycotted by the people you were appeasing, while earning zero credit from the people you spent a decade alienating. You cannot split the difference on a conviction you never had.
The Bottom Line
Home Depot deleted a page. It did not change a policy, refund a program, or reverse a decision. Its score is 56/100, and it will stay there until something real moves.
If you want to keep shopping there, shop there — this site exists to hand you the number, not the decision. But make the choice with the ledger in front of you, and know that the parking lot shortcut to Lowe's at 64 is a downgrade, not a protest. Browse the full Non-Woke Home Improvement Brands category to see where every scored chain in the aisle actually lands.
You can 404 a webpage. You can't 404 a record.