In recent weeks, the Silicon Valley tech giant Salesforce.com has delivered a message to gun-selling retailers such as Camping World: Stop selling military-style rifles or stop using our software, the Washington Post reports. The pressure Salesforce is exerting on retailers — barring them from using its technology to market products, manage customer service operations and fulfill orders — puts them in a difficult position. Camping World spends more than $1 million a year on Salesforce’s e-commerce software. Switching to another provider could cost the company double that to migrate data, reconfigure systems and retrain employees.
The change in Salesforce’s acceptable-use policy shows how a technology giant mostly unknown to the public is trying to influence what retailers sell and alter the dynamics of a charged social issue. Salesforce is a dominant provider of software and services that help businesses manage their customers. With 40,000 employees and a market value of nearly $120 billion, it has become a behemoth in San Francisco. Its branded skyscraper towers over the city. Its decision to force its position on guns on retailers did not sit well with some industry advocates. These types of rules are “corporate-policy virtue signaling” and discriminate against gun owners, whose rights are protected by the Second Amendment, said Mark Oliva of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. “It is a very chilling effect when a company as large as Salesforce puts out a policy like this,” Oliva said. “A policy like this is not surprising from a company based in that part of the country.” Salesforce’s new policy bars customers that sell a range of firearms — including automatic and semiautomatic — from using its e-commerce technology.