Yet in appeasing conservative critics, Tractor Supply risks shrinking the large, diverse customer base that helped it grow into a Fortune 300 company and ostracizing the “exburban” shoppers it’s depending on to jump-start stalling sales.
Tractor Supply repeatedly touted its roots in rural America in explaining why it was curtailing DEI and ESG efforts. Yet rural America is not where its business is likely to grow in the future. Indeed, Tractor Supply has long served the “exurban customer”—one who lives not in deeply rural, often politically conservative regions, but at the edge of more liberal metropolitan areas, where backyards can be tallied in several acres.
The retailer was founded in the 1930s to serve working farms, but Tractor Supply became a retail giant, earning $14 billion in revenue last year, by catering to hobbyist farmers, including suburbanites with larger properties who love gardening and dabble in livestock. Its midsize, carefully curated stores offer an eclectic mix of work clothes (Tractor Supply was the first major retailer to jump on the Carhartt phenomenon), tools, pet food, and feed for farm animals (especially chickens, goats, and horses). Today, the core Tractor Supply customer typically has one to five acres of land, and some small livestock like chickens, hogs, or sheep. What’s more, professional farmers are only 10% of its customers, down from 90% at the company’s start in 1938.
(Tractor Supply declined to comment to Fortune beyond its statement last week.)
In its statement, Tractor Supply said, “Going forward, we will ensure our activities and giving tie directly to our business.” Only three months ago, Tractor Supply was saying the exact opposite. “Diversity and inclusion play a key role in moving our business forward,” Tractor Supply claimed in its annual proxy filing in March.
And Tractor Supply had been doing well by at least one DEI metric. Last year, Tractor Supply, one of 1,300 companies to fill out Human Rights Campaign’s survey, earned a near-perfect score of 95/100 for workplace protections and outreach to the LGBTQ+ community. Last week, the company said it would “no longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign,” one of the biggest LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in the United States.
Lawton told Fortune in 2021 that Tractor Supply wanted “our stores and our team members to mirror the communities that we serve.” In its annual report published in March, Tractor Supply noted that racial and ethnic minorities represent 18% of its workforce, just one percentage point higher than in 2021. The company’s new anti-DEI stance will make moving the needle even more difficult.
