Hobby Lobby - The Controversial History

[Music] hobby lobby has been among the most polarizing companies out there some of it goes back pretty far but especially over the past decade or so it seems like not much time passes by before they're all over the news again and everyone's talking about their latest controversy this is large-scale stuff so for this video i've selected five of them that i feel are either their biggest or most significant but first if you're not familiar with hobby lobby they are a very successful chain of nearly 1 000 stores that specializes in selling materials used in various hobbies and crafts much like the name implies their biggest most direct competitors would be stores like michaels and joanne they're somewhat comparable in size but hobby lobby does stand out from them on the business end because unlike the other two they have always been a private company owned by the same family who started it their close control of the company is actually what allows them to make some bold moves that lead to many of these controversies david green is their founder and long time ceo and however you feel about him or the decisions he's made you have to admit that he knows about retail his private ownership of a major retail chain has made him one of the richest people in the world with a net worth of over 8 billion dollars which i think is especially striking considering how modest everything was early on his family was fairly poor growing up so in high school in the 1950s he started working full-time stocking shelves at a local five and dime store in oklahoma and i think that's where he found his passion for retail after high school he joined the air force reserve for a little bit but by age 21 he was right back into retail soon helping to manage a discount store that store would sell a lot of picture frames and david green took notice he eventually got together with one of his co-workers named larry pico to start this tiny picture frame manufacturing business that they called graco products which was a combination of their names green and pico they started with a 600 loan they worked out of their garage and green's wife and children would help out by assembling the frames at the kitchen table but it grew and after about two years they opened their first store in oklahoma city it was only around 300 square feet and sold a limited number of craft supplies so the following year larry pico was willing to sell his part of the company to green for five thousand dollars one of the biggest things helping the company at the time was a strong demand for beads a big accessory in hippie fashion two years later in 1975 green got enough money together to open a second much larger location and that's when things started taking off averaging one new store each year well into the 1980s by that time one of the biggest factors behind their success was the strong local economy the oil market was doing really well which was good for the residents of oklahoma and it gave them money that they can spend at hobby lobby david green even tried to take advantage of this by selling some luxury items like high-end furniture and luggage but that proved to be a terrible decision soon after oil prices dropped many people lost their job and the local economy pretty much collapsed because it turns out they were far too reliant on a single product people could no longer afford to buy his luxury items or even his regular items in many cases so hobby lobby started losing money he was forced to refocus his products back on arts and crafts and refinance some of those loans and luckily in the end was just barely able to avoid bankruptcy that was a pivotal point in their history today their success comes from focusing on the customer and providing them with the best possible experience the way they do that is by stocking a wide selection they try to sell every piece you may need for a project so you don't have to go around to different stores they also strive to have helpful employees part of that involves paying them more and providing better benefits than others in their industries so they stay longer and have an overall lower turnover rate for example in 2020 they implemented this company-wide 17 dollar an hour minimum wage also i think it's interesting that for a long time they've avoided the computer barcode system which according to david green is because he thinks manually updating those price stickers makes the employees more knowledgeable and therefore more helpful to the customers it has been argued that this leads to longer checkout times which is bad for the customers but it shows how they're doing their own thing different from the standard they also strive to have at least somewhat reasonable prices and that can be attributed to keeping their costs down they commonly establish their stores in empty or abandoned retail space rather than making their own building and a lot of their inventory is obtained by cheaper vendors overseas all right that helps explain their appeal to the customers and how hobby lobby became such a successful chain of stores despite the controversies now at this point i feel like i need to give a disclaimer i'm going to be talking about some touchy issues things that people rightfully feel passionate about so i want to make it clear that my intention of this video is not to bash them or to praise them i'm simply trying to present these controversies in the most objective way that i can i'm going to try to give a fair representation of what's been happening and then based on your own viewpoints or beliefs or whatever else you can take what i say combine it with stuff that you learn from other places and use it to form your own opinions that was a long disclaimer i just want you to know that if i say something that you find defensive or insensitive it was unintentional and i'm doing my best i can't believe that i have gone this far in a video about hobby lobby without even saying the word religion because that's at the center of it david green and the rest of his family are some of the most religious people that you will ever see his father was a preacher as are many other members of the green family all of the stores are closed on sundays due to religious reasons they openly say that they are committed to honoring the lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with biblical principles so just keep all of that in mind because you will notice a reoccurring theme the first controversy that i'm going to be talking about is their newspaper ads during the christmas season of 1995 david green noticed a lack of testimony in newspapers talking about the true meaning of the holidays and he says that he felt commissioned by god to do something about it essentially i think he felt that god wanted him to tell people about the religious aspects of various holidays so ever since multiple times a year during the holidays they've taken out these full-page newspaper ads with these very christian messages they don't even advertise the company they're just talking about religion the issue that many people take with this is that they don't want to be confronted with such strong messages that push someone else's beliefs upon them they've been called politically incorrect especially this one for the 4th of july in 2021 there was a big backlash against it claiming that it quoted the founding fathers out of context and advocated for a combination of church and states david green claims that they've generally received minimal negative feedback within their stores but at the very least they do present some polarizing material that many people do find offensive next up on the list is potential discrimination there's arguments that have been made for a few different groups of people but the main one here seems to be focused on the jewish community mainly due to their lack of hanukkah merchandise now obviously they don't have to sell hanukkah merchandise but many of their stores are located in areas with large jewish populations so then the question becomes why aren't they selling it there if it seems like they're going to be profitable in doing so are they in fact discriminating against a religion different from theirs by not wanting them as customers those suspicions were happening for a while and then it all escalated in 2013 it was reported that a customer asked an employee if they sold any bar mitzvah cards and the employee's response was to say we don't cater to you people obviously an inappropriate response but we have to remember that this was one employee that did not represent the entire company right away hobby lobby apologized for the incident and that apology was recognized and accepted by the anti-defamation league honestly that's about the strongest evidence that i could find supporting any anti-semitism but it was enough to get the belief out there so based on that it has become a part of their public image okay here we go i wanted to put their biggest controversy right in the middle here it has to do with contraceptives the affordable care act or obamacare required that when a company offered a health insurance plan that plan had to cover birth control without sharing the cost with the individual churches didn't have to follow it and non-profits had their own set of rules but a hobby lobby being a us company that generated profits was in fact forced to follow it however they took issue with it because it went against their beliefs to be clear about it it wasn't all of the birth control that they objected to their big issue was with the emergency contraception the morning after pill in certain iuds because they felt that it was a form of abortion we're not going to solve anything here because this involves some of the most debated issues of all time but i think that we can see where hobby lobby was coming from i mean that family clearly believes in the principles of their faith and if they thought that they were providing people with something that was so morally harmful and wrong of course they're going to take issue with it but then the other end had some pretty big arguments it is such a personal thing why should your employer have any say in those matters just mind your own business let your employees make their own decisions based on their own beliefs plus there is an argument that contraception actually leads to fewer abortions which is kind of hurting their own cause there in the end the case went to the supreme court where it had a five to four ruling in favor of hobby lobby it set a precedent that said closely held companies where five or fewer people own half of it no longer had to provide it very heavy stuff here even the supreme court was divided so i am curious to hear what everyone thinks about this but please try to keep it calm moving on to their next source of controversy which comes from the museum of the bible see the green family spent hundreds of millions of dollars to open this museum in washington dc years earlier they started collecting artifacts for it and in 2017 it was open to the public already you have to be skeptical here is it truly an educational museum a simple way to educate people about matters involving the bible like they say it is or is it a big effort to secretly convert people to their religion that's a big debate on its own but the bigger controversy here stems from the artifacts themselves in short they haven't done the best job in confirming their authenticity or where they came from they had bought this 3 500 year old tablet called the gilgamesh dream tablet later found to be illegally imported into the united states in 2017 they paid a 3 million fine for obtaining thousands of other artifacts illegally shipped out of the middle east they've also displayed a collection of dead sea scrolls that were later found to be fake those are just a few examples i don't want to go too far into this because it involves the family more so than hobby lobby itself but it's all connected the chairman of that museum is steve green who is the son of david greene and the president of hobby lobby his defense in the matter has pretty much been that he was ignorant in those situations he didn't really know what he was doing when it came to running a museum and he trusted the wrong people to advise him i cannot believe that we are still going but my final source of controversy is remaining open during the pandemic in march of 2020 when all of the non-essential businesses were being shut down due to government mandates hobby lobby was very much fighting against it it depends on the area but they were generally slow to shut down and then opened back up very quickly they claimed to be an essential business and then that brought even more debates an argument that i thought was funny was when people were claiming that the name hobby lobby implies that they are non-essential but then they came back with all of these arguments saying that they sold materials for people to make their own masks they sold educational materials for people that were forced to stay home for school that they sold at home small business materials so again it's all up to interpretation are they truly essential or are they just looking for an excuse to irresponsibly stay open and then a couple weeks later they did this complete 180 where they abruptly closed all of their stores and told their employees that they wouldn't be getting paid so definitely a lot of backlash from the public and their own employees regarding how they handled that whole situation let me know in the comments where do you stand on all of these controversies i imagine some people watching this are completely disgusted with their actions while others for the most part are supportive so any thoughts you have about hobby lobby whether it be the controversies or the business itself leave them in the comments i'd like to hear what you have to say thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Company Man

Views: 734,486

Keywords: Hobby Lobby, Controversy, Business, Company History

Id: pU7UA8dTbdk

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021