Best Buy

DEI & Hiring Quotas (heavy weight, -2)In 2020 Best Buy publicly pledged to fill one-third of new corporate roles and one-third of new vendor spend with BIPOC employees and Black/Latino-owned vendors by 2025 — an explicit racial target. The company built out a Black Employee Resource Group and a “Build with Best Buy” cohort prioritized by race. A 2024 shareholder derivative complaint (filed by America First Legal) alleged these targets violated Title VII and Section 1981. Through 2025 Best Buy has softened public language around the targets but has not formally retired them — placing it in Tier C (Partial Rollback, ceiling 6).

Corporate Activism (-1)Best Buy signed onto the 2021 corporate voting-rights letter opposing Georgia’s SB 202 election-integrity reforms, signed onto post-2018 corporate gun-control letters, and the Best Buy Foundation has publicly prioritized BIPOC youth in its grant-making — substantively retained even where corporate-side language has cooled.

Federal PAC Giving (+1)Per OpenSecrets/FEC filings, the Best Buy Co. PAC has donated roughly 60–70% to Republican federal candidates across recent cycles — a quiet counterweight to the public progressive activism.

Free Speech / Censorship (neutral, 0)No notable record of de-platforming conservative speech or political ad refusals. Retail neutral.

Net ScoreDEI -2, activism -1, PAC +1, neutral 0 = -2. Mapped to the 1-9 scale with a Tier C ceiling of 6 = 4 / Mixed.