Academy, You're Fired!

[LSUTiger]

http://bearingarms.com/bob-o/2016/06/16 ... cowardice/

[The Marshal]

[flowrie]

I just sent my email to Academy advising I will no longer shop there due to the removal of ARs from display.

[Oldgringo]

I've never been a big fan of Academy. Maybe it's because of the attitude of the employees in the Tyler store.

[RoyGBiv]

Below is a post I made on another gun forum......

It's much easier to MMQB Academy's response than it would be to explain to their shareholders why they didn't seek some cover when the libhadis started lobbing mortars their way. Academy is one of the retail faces of the Second Amendment. When's the last time you walked in to a Daniel Defense retail store filled with golfers, tennis players, weightlifters and joggers.?

Do I like what DD did? It certainly has some marketing panache. Was it risky for them? I'm guessing the folks that buy DD don't do so at Academy in big numbers. Just a guess.

Am I ready to throw Academy under the bus? Not nearly.

If your first move in this chess match is to fall on your sword, I don't want to play on your team.

[suthdj]

They should get same treatment CTD got last time.

[steveincowtown]

It's much easier to MMQB Academy's response than it would be to explain to their shareholders why they didn't seek some cover when the libhadis started lobbing mortars their way. Academy is one of the retail faces of the Second Amendment. When's the last time you walked in to a Daniel Defense retail store filled with golfers, tennis players, weightlifters and joggers.?

Academy is not a publicly held company. They are owned by an investment group based on NYC. They have zero interest in supporting the 2A or any other agenda or sport. Heck, they don't even have an interest is supporting pro golf. The investment firm does one thing. Buys companies, grows them, and then sells them for a profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg_Kravis_Roberts

[RoyGBiv]

They should get same treatment CTD got last time.

I'll respectfully disagree..

Seeking cover is not nearly as egregious as scalping.

[RoyGBiv]

It's much easier to MMQB Academy's response than it would be to explain to their shareholders why they didn't seek some cover when the libhadis started lobbing mortars their way. Academy is one of the retail faces of the Second Amendment. When's the last time you walked in to a Daniel Defense retail store filled with golfers, tennis players, weightlifters and joggers.?

Academy is not a publicly held company. They are owned by an investment group based on NYC. They have zero interest in supporting the 2A or any other agenda or sport. Heck, they don't even have an interest is supporting pro golf. The investment firm does one thing. Buys companies, grows them, and then sells them for a profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg_Kravis_Roberts

So because they are not publicly held they have no investors?

[steveincowtown]

It's much easier to MMQB Academy's response than it would be to explain to their shareholders why they didn't seek some cover when the libhadis started lobbing mortars their way. Academy is one of the retail faces of the Second Amendment. When's the last time you walked in to a Daniel Defense retail store filled with golfers, tennis players, weightlifters and joggers.?

Academy is not a publicly held company. They are owned by an investment group based on NYC. They have zero interest in supporting the 2A or any other agenda or sport. Heck, they don't even have an interest is supporting pro golf. The investment firm does one thing. Buys companies, grows them, and then sells them for a profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg_Kravis_Roberts

So because they are not publicly held they have no investors?

Not sure what the path your going down is supposed to mean, but yes they do have investors, but no they do not have shareholders. The investors don't care one bit what Academy does or doesn't do. They don't carry if the sell guns or don't sell guns. They care that they bought an asset, and want it to grow and then sell it.

Back on point though, I am not sure why anyone would buy guns from Academy anyhow. Much better deals to be found on slickguns.com. My last 8 purchases were all bought from there and then shipped to an FFL that does transfers for $10.

[flowrie]

I am part of the "market", if I decide to throw them under the bus, so be it.
Their decisions have consequences. just like Target stores.
Plenty of other retailers out there.

[somewhereinhouston]

Investors do care. At some point the investment company wants their money back. It behooves them to make sure their investment increases in value in order to profit from it sale. If Academy is no long as valuable as when they purchased it then it is lose of capital.

[RoyGBiv]

It's much easier to MMQB Academy's response than it would be to explain to their shareholders why they didn't seek some cover when the libhadis started lobbing mortars their way. Academy is one of the retail faces of the Second Amendment. When's the last time you walked in to a Daniel Defense retail store filled with golfers, tennis players, weightlifters and joggers.?

Academy is not a publicly held company. They are owned by an investment group based on NYC. They have zero interest in supporting the 2A or any other agenda or sport. Heck, they don't even have an interest is supporting pro golf. The investment firm does one thing. Buys companies, grows them, and then sells them for a profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg_Kravis_Roberts

So because they are not publicly held they have no investors?

Not sure what the path your going down is supposed to mean, but yes they do have investors, but no they do not have shareholders. The investors don't care one bit what Academy does or doesn't do. They don't carry if the sell guns or don't sell guns. They care that they bought an asset, and want it to grow and then sell it.

Back on point though, I am not sure why anyone would buy guns from Academy anyhow. Much better deals to be found on slickguns.com. My last 8 purchases were all bought from there and then shipped to an FFL that does transfers for $10.

Of course they have shareholders. I can own my piece of Academy through KKR.... http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/kkr

I agree with you that Academy is not my place to buy guns or ammo, unless they have an unusually good deal. I did buy a shotgun there once.

My point is.... if you're in a fight and the enemy has taken the offensive, do you support the guys on the front lines when they try to find some cover or do you call them cowards and leave them? I'm not excited about what Academy decided to do, but I see it as being stuck between a rock and a hard place. If gun owners abandon academy before they've made a final decision on MSR's, doesn't that decide the issue for them? Wouldn't we have lost a (however small you see it) supporter simply because they haven't passed your own personal purity test? If Academy get thousands of letters from Anti's applauding their decision and we pile on by abandoning them, is that good strategy?

I gotta run to a meeting... Sorry for the quick reply.

[anomie]

Not sure what the path your going down is supposed to mean, but yes they do have investors, but no they do not have shareholders.

It's sort of an irrelevant point, but being privately held and not having shares and shareholders are not the same thing. I have owned shares in a non-public company (I owned them because I exercised option grants that if I hadn't exercised would have expired, and I figured I'd rather be out $x if the company never went public than regret letting them expire if the company did go public. Which turned out fairly ok in the end, but made doing my taxes a PITA the year the company went private again after it had gone public a couple of years earlier) . Whether or not Academy has shares will be based on whether or not the investment company that owns them *wants* Academy to be set up so that it has shares, and if those shares aren't publicly traded the only people that would be able to easily determine if there are shares or shareholders would be those private shareholders - which, if Academy does have shares, may be in fact be just the company that owns them. And if they do have private shareholders, those private shareholders may have essentially zero pull with respect to what the company does.

This concludes your daily dose of pedantry.

[Soccerdad1995]

Not sure what the path your going down is supposed to mean, but yes they do have investors, but no they do not have shareholders.

It's sort of an irrelevant point, but being privately held and not having shares and shareholders are not the same thing. I have owned shares in a non-public company (I owned them because I exercised option grants that if I hadn't exercised would have expired, and I figured I'd rather be out $x if the company never went public than regret letting them expire if the company did go public. Which turned out fairly ok in the end, but made doing my taxes a PITA the year the company went private again after it had gone public a couple of years earlier) . Whether or not Academy has shares will be based on whether or not the investment company that owns them *wants* Academy to be set up so that it has shares, and if those shares aren't publicly traded the only people that would be able to easily determine if there are shares or shareholders would be those private shareholders - which, if Academy does have shares, may be in fact be just the company that owns them. And if they do have private shareholders, those private shareholders may have essentially zero pull with respect to what the company does.

This concludes your daily dose of pedantry.

Short answer - if Academy is structured as a corporation (including an LLC, S Corp, etc), then they have shares and also have shareholders. I am willing to make an educated guess that they are almost certainly structured as a corporation for various purposes including legal liability and the ease of the current investors to liquidate their investment on the back end by potentially going public.

But I think the original point is that Academy has fewer owners to answer to since they are privately held. That is true regardless of how Academy is structured.