Over at Insty’s, Stephen Green commented on this little story that he couldn’t imagine going into a Levi Strauss store ever again, and I agree.
Levi Strauss announced on Tuesday it would be creating a new gun-control group with billionaire Michael Bloomberg and donating millions of dollars to a collection of established gun-control groups.
I don’t wear jeans often — in fact, I last wore them about a year ago, so I’m hardly in Levi’s target market anyway.
But that’s not the “temptation” I refer to in the headline; this is.
A couple weeks back I gave a woman a “lyft” to the airport. She’d just come out of the Levi Strauss store here in Plano, and as we drove off I asked her what she’d just bought there. She said “Nothing; actually, I work for Levi Strauss.”
For a moment I considered — really considered — whether I should act like someone from the Left would act, and terminate the ride then and there, declaring that as a member of the National Rifle Association, I refused to provide a service to an organization which supported gun control.
I didn’t do that, of course, because I’m not some virtue-signaling asshole. What I could have done was start to talk about how much I loved guns, and shooting, just to piss her off; but I didn’t do that either because that might have “triggered” the woman into giving me a one-star Uber rating at ride’s end, running the risk that she was a virtue-signaling asshole (she was a San Francisco native, so the odds would have been high).
As it stands, though, I’ll just have to content myself with never again buying anything associated with Levi Strauss (which would be Dockers, Signature and Denizen).
Bastards.
I wear jeans most every day, but since I don’t do much actual work they don’t wear out very fast, I have Wrangler’s that are almost a decade old and it is very seldom I notice anyone wearing Levi’s out here in the Texas Hill country. Having been in retail marketing and management for years I used to try to stay neutral and enjoy taking money from conservatives and liberals making them feel a sense of appreciation when they made purchases.
I really don’t know who the Levi and Nike customers are, maybe they know their market and think virtue signaling will enhance their base and increase their sales. However I am really, truly hoping their decisions to take on my part of the country will bite them in the butt and masticate the hell out of their sales.
That’s the funny thing.
1) The edgy youth market they are trying to reach doesn’t have any money
2) The really Woke aren’t impressed when multi-billion dollar multi-national companies that use 3rd world sweatshops try to virtue signal.
I haven’t bought a pair of Levis since they moved production to China. I quite liked the 501s back in the day, but these days there are domestic designer jean makers that produce considerably higher quality and more interesting stuff for not really that much more cost.
…since they moved production to China.
One take on the Nike and Levis virtue-signaling is that it comes down to this. Trump’s policies are a threat to their business plans.
Questions nobody ever asked Sir Keith Park:
“Aren’t you just sinking to their level? Aren’t you just being the same kind of asshole as them?”
I’d like to see firearms owners awakened to the fact that one of “our” brands, Levis, now made outside the U.S., is actively supporting Socialist-Progressives (aka the Democratic party) the very same people who would like to remove the 2nd amendment from our Constitution.
I have a Chinese friend who tells me that WMart imports 700-900 containers of jeans per month to the US.
Jeans are a big commodity.
The Strauss family was anti-gun decades ago. Then they (so I understand) sold off the corporation.
This is just the corporation returning to their roots.