12 hours ago, /u/OnThe45th posted Dick's Sporting Goods inference that theft was the reason for their dismal performance. To OnThe45th's credit, their initial reaction was to wonder if it Dick's claim might be deceptive. However, in the next breath, they declared it must be genuine.
I just scanned that thread, looking for any pushback or anyone searching for facts to confirm or refute Dick's claim. There were only a handful out of nearly a thousand comments, and all were voted down to the level where they aren't displayed. I might reply with a list if I get the chance.
Well, as the day has transpired, we can see what Dick's did here. As covered by industry reporter Gabrielle Fontrouge, this was some fairly underhanded misdirection.
She reports that in their press release, Dick's blames theft, but during detailed questioning in their conference call and earnings report details, they change their story. It turns out inventory charges were the major cause, not theft. Those inventory charges were a direct result of management failure from the prior quarters. And Dick's deceptive tries to conflate shrink with theft, even though theft is actually a subset of shrink.
Shrink includes all kinds of loss mechanism, like bad packaging, shipping damage, staff and supplier pilfering, lowering of quality control, sloppy accounting and inventory and all sorts of things which aren't theft.
And besides, if theft were truly the cause, as the myth they sound tries to suggest, it's a failure of management to not do a better job of loss prevention and mitigation. Losing $3000 a day because you don't want to spend $300 on security? That's a failure of management. (if the excuse were even true)
Gabrielle further reports that when you look at statistics and surveys that are data driven and anonymous, theft is down massively over the last decade. A lot of the recent chatter about crime rising tends to come from disinformation and/or politically motivated sources. It's red meat that everyone can chime into, because we've all had our own anecdotal experience seeing a crime or hearing about it. But individual anecdotes are not vetted and scale data.
Dick's, like other large corporate entities, is hyper-conservative politically, so they appear to be both feeding and using culture war claims about rising crime to not only cover for their our executive mismanagement, but also take shots at the current government to try and boost conservative politicians' fortunes.
That thread shows how cravenly effective this kind of false fear mongering can be.
People can say what they want in social media, but when their actual money is on the line, they will often act in ways that conflicts with what they say publicly. And we can see that despite 99% of comments supporting Dick's false cover story, those same people largely voted non-confidence, and sold DCKS down 20%.
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