Big businesses are increasingly torn between activist leadership and a customer base that just wants to stump up its cash and be on its way. Customers’ patience is wearing thin. The latest company seemingly eager to pick a fight with its clientele is DIY chain Wickes.

A video dug up by campaigner James Esses shows the shop’s chief operating officer Fraser Longden taking part in a panel at PinkNews’s Trans+ Summit. The discussion, which took place last month, was entitled ‘The Role of Senior Leaders in Trans+ Inclusion’. So far, so corporate. At least it was until Longden was asked whether Wickes had received any backlash for its stance. He told the panel:

‘I just decided to ignore it, right, because I wasn’t doing what we were doing at Wickes for them… I don’t think I’m ever going to change some of the bigots out there’s mind. I’m never going to win that argument with them. So we were doing it to show support to the community and hopefully to try and get more people to be curious, in where most of the population are, which is this sort of slightly ignorant, but mostly kind position…’

It’s a bold customer-retention strategy. But Longden wasn’t finished there:

‘I’m just not prepared to spend time as an organisation or as an individual putting effort into that ten per cent at the bottom because I’m not gonna win, I’m not gonna change their mind, and it’s just going to be soul-destroying… They’re just not worth the airspace. I didn’t respond to one email.’

He went on to discuss the DIY retailer’s attitude towards a potential boycott. It was essentially a shrug of the shoulders, only wordier:

‘The people who are sort of going, “Oh, we’re gonna boycott you”, and we’ve had a few of those and stuff, they’re not. You know, they need a tin of paint, they’re going to go the nearest place to them next time they need one.’

He expanded on this by drawing a contrast between the vast majority and the truly reprobate:

‘The other ten per cent, at the other end — and I’m making up the numbers of ten per cent — you know, they’re just hot air. They will go and buy a tin of paint in the nearest place to them. That might have been us before, it might not have been us after afterwards. Equally, if they do come in and buy that tin of paint and behave in that way, then they’re not welcome in our stores.’

I asked Wickes if Longden was speaking for the company with his remarks, and if Wickes considers ‘most of the population’ to be ‘slightly ignorant’ and gender-critical people ‘bigots’. In particular, was the company really saying that customers who disagree with its stance on trans issues were ‘not welcome in our stores’? A spokeswoman told me:

‘At Wickes we are proud to be an inclusive home improvement employer and support the LGBTQ+ community in its entirety. We are committed to building a workplace and culture where all colleagues can feel at home.’

That seems like a pretty clear answer.

Longden is Wickes’ former head of human resources. Of course he is. Time was when HR managers were content to look busy by visiting their petty, pointless tyrannies on their employees. Now all of us have been added to the company Slack and told to be mindful of our micro-aggressions.

The corporate world’s embrace of the LGBT movement should make us pause to ask where that movement has gone wrong

The corporate world’s embrace of the LGBT movement should make us pause to ask where that movement has gone wrong. But its embrace by HR managers is an even more troubling phenomenon, a real ‘are we the baddies?’ moment.

It’s nice that Wickes wants to be inclusive, but calling people ignorant and bigots is not the way to go about it. Telling customers you don’t want their money is pretty exclusive, not to mention the worst spot of retail comms since Gerald Ratner confessed that his company’s products were ‘total crap’.

My theory is that people with non-jobs who invent non-priorities in response to non-problems are just unhappy with their careers. It’s not easy to admit your job is mundane when you’re bursting with idealism and want to make a difference. But the answer is not to turn an entire company into a platform for you to cosplay like you work at Greenpeace. The answer is to find a different job.

If you’re in the paint-flogging business, stick to flogging paint. And if your customers object to being scolded and disdained, it’s not because they’re bigots but because they don’t want a sermon on gender identity every time they buy emulsion. Those customers include some of us who belong to that alphabet-soup identity group you claim to be offering your allyship.

Wickes is far from alone in refusing to stick to the day job. US retail giant Target can’t decide whether to stock LGBT-themed products up front or hide them in the back. Bud Light even tried to market itself to followers of Dylan Mulvaney. Surprisingly enough, men who like to chug a cold one while talking Rugers, rotors and running backs weren’t keen on sharing a cultural milieu with Pride, pronouns and privilege-checking.

Sermonising is an opportunity for high-income executives with high-status views to pronounce anathema on people with much lower incomes and lower-status attitudes. The educated middle-classes have found a new way to sneer at the hairdressers, the taxi drivers and the till workers — and a progressive way at that.