CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, PA. — Several dozen people walked through the Butler County Tractor Supply store Saturday afternoon, which lies along U.S. Route 19 — a two-lane highway that, one hundred years after its inception, is still the long-haul road that connects the Gulf of Mexico with Lake Erie .
Over the past 20 years, this section of Route 19 has gone from farmland in all directions to standing on the precipice of suburban Pittsburgh with stately palatial suburban homes intertwined with western Pennsylvania ’s rural farmland, most of the inhabitants of conflicting forces finding a way to make it work.
Farms, shopping districts, and brand-new suburban and traffic plans have found ways to influence each other in ways most people don’t calculate, including how they use their disposable income.
Ten or even five years ago, farmers buying feed, a tractor, fencing, or gates would probably not have run into a suburban family of four spending the afternoon shopping at a tractor supply store with their kids darting between the baby chicks and begging for their parents to buy a go-kart or a new fishing pole. Instead, that family would probably be at a mall begging for a new handheld Game Boy or PlayStation.
Since COVID-19, a lot of people who never would have planted a garden, raised chickens, or gone fishing or hunting have made dramatic lifestyle changes. What may have started out as a way to deal with supply chain problems, staggering gas prices, and worker shortages became a lifestyle change to be not just more self-reliant but also to save money as inflation continues to wear on.
The company is an American success story: It has had 26 straight years of sales growth, expanded to over 2,000 stores, and employs more than 46,000 people — all despite having a name that makes some outsiders think they only supply tractors.
Established in the 1930s as a mail-order seed company, Butler County Tractor Supply is the nation’s largest rural lifestyle retailer and one of the fastest-rising companies in the Fortune 500. As of March of this year, the company operated 2,233 stores in 49 states and 202 Petsense by Tractor Supply stores in 23 states. Its net income for the quarter, that ended March 30, rose a whopping 8.2 percentage points from $183.1 million to $198.2 million this year alone.
One of the reasons Tractor Supply is so connected with its consumers is that its headquarters is located in Tennessee, meaning the decision makers weren’t living in Los Angeles or Manhattan and are culturally connected to the very people they serve. That’s a rarity among American corporations.
Why is that a big deal? Well, as outlined in The Great Revolt, corporations, institutions, academia, professional sports, and the media started to lose relationships and connections with their customers, students, consumers, and audiences when they started moving their locations to this country’s “super zip codes.” These are places where the culture is wildly different from the people who consume their products, meaning the corporate chieftains were out of touch with the very people they were serving.
The boardrooms of these places thought everyone shared their viewpoint that politics belonged in everything they did, in particular their leftist politics, and they began inflicting that on their customers.
The pain was swift and immediate for both parties. Consumers just wanted to shop without their favorite store, football team, football player, beer, or candy bar preaching to them about politics. Oftentimes they may have even shared their political view but still didn’t want to be preached to or scolded when buying dog food or those NFL tickets that cost them half their paychecks.
Some corporations learned quickly: Think Target , sort of. And some, such as Bud Light, did not.
Two weeks ago, Tractor Supply, which had previously avoided weighing in on political and cultural issues, dipped its toes into the volatile world of politics. The company was called out on social media for sponsoring non-Tractor Supply business activities such as “pride” festivals, voting campaigns, and adopting DEI hiring practices.
The company responded quickly, within days, basically saying, “My bad.” A statement went out saying the company would no longer sponsor non-business events, left- or right-leaning, and focus more on business-related sponsorships well within its wheelhouse, such as education, animal welfare, veteran causes, and being a good neighbor.
The company also said it would stop reporting corporate hiring data to the left-wing Human Rights Campaign.
“We work hard to live up to our mission and values every day and represent the values of the communities and customers we serve,” said Tractor Supply’s statement. “We have heard from customers that we disappointed them. We have taken this feedback to heart.”
Tractor Supply’s abrupt reversal makes sense.
“More and more companies whose companies are in the heartland primarily are going to resist taking the culture-war positions that Manhattan and San Francisco want them to take,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist.
In short, the initial decision to take Tractor Supply out of its non-political stance and into the fray was likely driven by someone on the board of directors or the shareholders of the publicly traded company, someone not from Tennessee — and not Hal Lawton, CEO of Tractor Supply, who has been a homeboy most of his life outside of his turn at Macy's Department Store.
Todd said stores such as Tractor Supply don’t have to choose the other side, but they will find that actively opposing the commonsense approach of their communities has no future in business.
“People can go to Amazon and buy from a company that does agree with them so the storefront companies better get with their audience,” he said.
Several new organizations have reported that Tractor Supply has fractured their consumers, with Bloomberg reporting that its decision “will stunt its growth” and CNN writing, “My Tractor Supply hat was a symbol. Now it’s in the garbage.”
Here is the rub on those stories: This is about Tractor Supply getting out of the culture wars, something most people wish corporations, institutions, and academia would all do.
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In 2022, Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a leading global political risk research and consulting firm, warned that customers, employees, and investors, mostly on the left, were bringing the U.S. culture wars to corporate boardrooms and, in doing so, were risking their corporations’ bottom lines and their customers’ trust. Bremmer repeated that warning earlier this year, writing that culture wars represent one of the biggest business risks in 2024.
Tractor Supply quickly recognized that what made it a good partner with their customers was not being a purveyor of politics. That former attitude made Tractor Supply one of the fastest-growing companies in the country.
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