Walmart becomes latest US brand to scrap DEI policies after right-wing pressure

Retail chain Walmart has scrapped its equality policies after pressure from right-wing pundits, who threatened to boycott the brand before the Black Friday sales (29 November).

Robby Starbuck, a former music video director who is leading the charge against diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies in the US, took to social media to celebrate Walmart abandoning its commitments, telling his followers that the stores were dropping “woke policies”.

Starbuck claimed he told executives at Walmart, which has 1.6 million employees and nearly 5,000 locations in the US, that he was “doing a story on wokeness there” and had “productive conversations to find solutions”.

The business will now no longer take part in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index – it earned a perfect score of 100 in 2023 – stop selling “inappropriate sexual and/or transgender products” marketed at children, review Pride funding and no longer provide staff with racial-equity training.

Walmart will also stop using the term Latinx, discontinue the use of DEI as a term and “will evaluate supplier diversity programmes and ensure they do not provide preferential treatment and benefits to suppliers based on diversity”.

Starbuck said the changes would “send shockwaves throughout corporate America” and described the move as “the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America”, which has become something of a catchphrase for him.

MASSIVE news: Walmart is ending their woke policies. I can now exclusively tell you what’s changing and how it happened.

Last week I told execs at @Walmart that I was doing a story on wokeness there. Instead we had productive conversations to find solutions.

Below are the… pic.twitter.com/BD02xJQ0X2

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) November 25, 2024

“This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees, who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected, but it will also extend to their many suppliers,” he claimed.

“We’ve now changed policy at companies worth over $2 trillion dollars (£1.59 trillion), with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. I’m happy to have secured these changes before Christmas when shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies.”

Companies such as Amazon and Target “should be very nervous” that their “top competitor dropped woke policies first”, he added.

“Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on Earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies.

“Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.”

In recent months, Starbuck has set his sights on a number of big corporate name, including Ford, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson and Jack Daniel’s.

His campaign followed on from the backlash against Bud Light for its partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, during which right-wingers threatened to boycott the brand, with some seen smashing bottles on supermarket shelves and musician Kid Rock even filming himself shooting cans of the beer.

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