Wal-Mart Cuts Back on Gun Sales
April 14, 2006 — -- Wal-Mart, which sells everything from guns to butter in many of its giant stores, says it is adjusting its products to meet changing demands. It will remove rifles and shotguns from about a thousand stores, roughly a third of its U.S. outlets.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, says it's a simple marketing decision. Karen Burk, a spokeswoman for the retail giant, told ABC News the decision "is based 100 percent on Wal-Mart's ongoing commitment to stocking what their customers want to buy."
As the chain expands from rural America into cities and suburbs, Burk said it has found that hunting equipment takes up shelf space that could be better used for other sporting goods, such as exercise gear.
The decision on whether to discontinue gun sales will be made store by store, Wal-Mart said. The chain has about 1,900 supercenters and 1,200 discount centers spread around all 50 states. Until its just-announced plan, the "vast majority" of Wal-Mart stores offered rifles and shotguns, said Burk; stores in Alaska sold handguns as well.
Gun sales are more likely to continue at stores in the South and Midwest, where hunting remains popular, than at stores in the more densely populated Northeast. Wal-Marts in New Jersey, for instance, have never stocked firearms because the state required salespeople to take a firearms safety course. The chain decided not to go along.
The company has more than 1.6 million employees in the United States, and in the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, it reported sales of $312.4 billion. In 2002, it jumped to No. 1 on the Fortune 500 list of companies in America, though on the newest Fortune 500 list Exxon Mobil bumped it from the No. 1 spot. In revenues, Wal-Mart is six times larger than Target, its closest rival in the "general merchandiser" category.
So how much of a difference will Wal-Mart's shift in its gun-stocking policy make in national firearms sales? Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, which works for tougher gun-control laws, said he believed Wal-Mart was only following a national trend.
