By Brandon via concealednation.org
After some intense backlash against the company from Second Amendment supporters around the country after one of their employees made a statement against carrying firearms inside their stores, Harbor Freight issued a public statement on their Facebook page . . .
Here is the comment that started it all:
So why the change of heart? Was the comment above not approved or maybe out of context? Whatever the case may be, it seems that Harbor Freight is not not a fan of customers carrying while inside their stores.
The bottom line: Shopping at Harbor Freight with firearm in tow is now a non-issue. Thanks for the clarification.
Let’s end with a comment from Ron, and the response from Harbor Freight after the above announcement. Again, I like their response to this issue. They handled it very well.
I like it. Follow the law and leave us alone to run our business.
Booya.
Foot in mouth, I hope the person running their mouth on social media as a spokesperson for HF gets reprimanded, if not pink slipped, still going to take a while before I think about giving them any hard earned dollars.
uhhh–where is “the comment that started it all”? I see the colon, but no quotation follows.
And, Ron, please stop excessively worrying over what someone (not you) might think of what someone else (also not you) might or might not be doing. You’ll be happier.
Ron says…
Listen up guys, I’m only interested in practicing, protecting, and affirming my rights as long as they don’t make my hippie friend look at me weird or make me a cool guy social outcast. Thanks.
Up until the very end, I was fine with him. He doesn’t like OC and doesn’t think it’s appropriate, for his own reasons. That’s fine. One of the great blessings of the Constitution is that it allows for a broad spectrum of beliefs, all without punishment. He also acknowledges that his feelings don’t have any impact on others. He respects the 2A and no more can or should be asked of him.
Then he gets to the end. I don’t know where his, “I wouldn’t defend someone OCing,” attitude comes from. Maybe it is just poor phrasing on his part. While there is no legal obligation to do so, I think that anybody who carries has a moral obligation to, *if they can without incurring unreasonable risk of harm to themselves*, defend others. Even one of the Moms Demand Gun Violence in Action crowd. Please don’t miss that called out caveat I included.
Honestly, if ALL companies simply took the stance of simply following the law and staying out of pro or anti politics they would not have to deal with these situations at all. Businesses like to keep things simple for themselves, simply following the law of the jurisdiction they are in is the easiest thing they can do to not get in the middle of controversy. “We are following the law, now everyone keep shopping or go home….done!”
LOL! website tells me I cannot edit comment but also tells me I have 5+ minutes to edit and when I tried to add this comment twice it tells me I am commenting too fast and to slow down LOL!
It has been bugging out with me quite a bit as well lately. I try to refresh the page and do it again, sometimes it works
I think it is a timer issue. The editor initially believes that the edit time has elapsed. This makes sense for the “posting too fast” message as well. If you refresh, sometime you must wait an actual minute, the editor works again. Sometimes after a refresh the edit time will be close to six minutes and it won’t let you save until it gets under five minutes. Again, it seems like a timer issue either on the client or server side.
Now that I know how to work around it, I’ve been able to edit any of my posts. It requires waiting up to a minute sometimes.
As much as I would like to do with “us” the people, it probably had a whole lot more to do with what several people said yesterday that nearly every major gun rag and NRA publication run Harbor Freight adverts. Methinks their marketing department got a few phone calls from magazine editors and that is probably what caused the about face. Funny how that works, either way, result!
I believe you’ve identified the likeliest scenario. How can HF advertise in gun mags while banning guns? It’s senseless.
Love it.
“Harbor Freight Tools would like to clarify its position…”
Translation:
When our official policy was disclosed via popular internet blogs, we have received a royal ass-chewing regarding our duplicitous behavior from the subscribers to many of the magazines we advertise in. We changed our policy to prevent losing a sh!tload of business.
Follow the money!!!
Que MDA in 3.. 2.. 1..
Nah. Not a single one of all 20 of MDA’s supporters has even heard of Harbor Freight. They don’t have those stores in the tony upscale gated communities in which those harpies live.
Exactly.
When you look at many POG from the perspective of Harbor Freight (or any other hardware/tools/supply store), you see customers. Lots and lots of customers.
Now, look at the Mothers Demanding Attention group. You don’t see customers. You see women who nag, bullyrag, harass and ass-chew some of your potential customers, but who aren’t your customers.
Easy decision.
Bingo. They don’t fix anything themselves, and neither do their feckless husbands. They just call someone to do it for them.
The problem here is that HF didn’t think through this, nor who their customers are. They are a pretty blue collar place, for me, a go-to-place for tools and the like. When we were buying plastic gloves last year during the Ebola scare, where did we go first? HF, and for good reason. They had exactly what we were looking for, in bulk. It is the sort of place where you expect to see the parking lot filled with pickups, and not Suburus, or even Priuses. There are places where an anti-gun stance may be good for business, but HF is not one of them, and is likely on the opposite extreme, where that sort of thing, if maintained, could bankrupt the company.
Which is maybe a long way of saying that if whomever put out the anti-gun policy is not a controlling owner of the company, they should be fired. They failed to understand their core customers, and let either their own politics, or that of some progressive meddlers override such. This is the sort of employee that can destroy a company.
Interestingly, Harbor Freight runs ads in American Rifleman.
Which I think is pretty funny. Whomever puts the ad in the American Rifleman probably knows their target market decently well. And whomever instituted this anti-gun policy didn’t.
I bet the way it went down was someone wrote HF because they saw someone with a gun.
HF’s legal dept. knee-jerked response was “No guns!”
Then the sh!t-storm from their actual customers hit them…
Geoff:
re the HF legal department
In the case of WI, they didn’t do their research.
WI has a statute which provides _immunity_ from liability for companies which allow employees &/or customers to be armed on the premises. If they post “keep out, evil gun owner” signs they lose that immunity.
It’s a no-brainer to keep immunity & honor civil rights.
What are the odds that the clowns in charge of the Facebook page made it up as they went along?
If so, HF needs to clarify that “no guns” was never policy and those responsible for trying to make it so have been sacked.
Something disturbing that I just realized; if these issues boil down to customer base, then the most vulnerable stores would be those frequented by women. I doubt all the little boutiques where women buy their 60,000 shoes and scarves would resist a gun ban. If you are looking for minimal resistance as a criminal, these are the places to be. Not that I have to say this here, but; ARM YOUR GALS!
Criminals generally target places that do a lot of cash business. Women, in my experience, are less likely to carry cash and prefer credit cards. I would imagine little boutiques and shoe stores like you’re talking about bring in very little cash.
Another MONUMENTAL WIN for MDA…..oh wait?? (LOL)
Fair enough…I’m still not buying their low-end tools…
I carry all the time in HF. I’ve never had any problems. But then again I carry concealed, not open.
If CC and/or OC is allowed in the jurisdiction where your business is, you should just abide by that. It makes things easier and is the right thing to do. Gun buster signs just complicate things.
In my state, no guns signs have the force of law. I know for a fact that the local Harbor Freight store isn’t posted. That make me think that, at worst, it’s left up to the discretion of local managers.
Remember that corporations are not always internally consistent. Just because a low level employee says something on Facebook, it’s not necessarily company policy approved specifically by the CEO.
This is true. I work at a gun store and the guy they have doing the facebook doesn’t know anything about guns. He does IT stuff, and the owners have him do facebook because IT and facebook are both computery things.
They get a couple of brownie points for being reasonable. All people and all companies screw up, the good ones fess up and fix it.
I still hesitate to buy tools there. I prefer to have fewer tools of better quality and make do without, that’s me an my opinion. I don’t buy tools at Walmart or KMart either..
It’s nice when a company makes the rules for entering their premises widely known. One would think that the absence of signs would be enough. Sadly, that hasn’t proven to be the case. Thank you Harbor Freight!
They adopted the Kroger model!
Well to me HF is a VERY DANGEROUS place to go armed OR unarmed. You just might be tempted to buy some piece of junk tool or part that could very well get you killed or injured later when you try to use it! Best to avoid HF!
🙂
Now we just need to get Target, Costco, and Ikea to see things this way.
I was going to build an AK using my 20 ton, HF press and take pictures of it with comments about how it sucks that HF doesn’t want to sell me any more tools. Now I guess I can just carry on.
That’s damn strange, because that is exactly where I went on the wear orange day where I open carried, which I hardly ever do. I went to Harbor Freight. Naturally nobody even noticed and there wasn’t any twits wearing orange to greet, so the entire thing was a bust. Hell, I didn’t even buy anything!
Virginia Citizens Defense League sells cards you can leave at gun-unfriendly businesses letting them know why they won’t be getting your money. I occasionally check VCDL’s list of unfriendly businesses online and avoid them altogether, but the one movie theatre that surprised me with a no guns sign in Centreville, VA prompted me to leave a card stuck in the door frame of their main entrance and go to another theatre.
I think it would be great if every concealed carrier kept a couple cards of this type, or some variation of it, in their wallet and left them at posted businesses, to raise awareness of the money these places stand to lose.
http://vcdl-gear.myshopify.com/collections/cards/products/no-guns-no-money-cards
Never shopping there anyway, just another American job-killing Chinese importer like Walmart.
Now if they would just start sourcing their inexpensive/cheap products somewhere other than from the Chicoms. India to Vietnam the entire arc are an option for disposable tools/equipment. Get to work guys.
This is completely reasonable.
We are discussing this blog post on the Wisconsin Carry facebook page, and several people have said that their local HF store is still posted (“keep out, evil gun owner” signs), only they’ve been moved from on the door to over the door, so they’re not easily visible.
I’ll have to go check my nearest HF stores to see if they’re still posted. It’s a shame if they don’t follow company policy, but I can shop elsewhere.