After retail giant Costco Wholesale's decision to remove all copies of Dinesh D'Souza's newest anti-Obama book from its stores by July 15 made headlines on Monday, thousands of Costco shoppers have threatened to drop their store memberships on the wholesaler's Facebook page, Newsmax Media reported. Despite claiming that the company's decision was financial and not political, their immediate reaction has been to announce that D'Souza's book, "America: Imagine a World Without Her," will now be back on shelves.
A nationwide "pull-order" was issued for D' Souza's book on July 1, which offers a strong rebuttal of the progressive ideology behind President Obama's policies, which have been supported by Costco co-founder and director Jim Sinegal, a major Democrat donor and a speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention that nominated the president, WND confirmed in a report Monday. A movie by the same name released last week at more than 1,000 movie theaters nationwide.
"Costco is not a book store. Our book shelf space is very limited," read a statement posted shortly after 8 p.m. on Tuesday. "We exercise discipline in the best utilization of that limited space based solely on what our members are buying. We can't carry every title that our members are interested in reading. We are constantly monitoring book sales, and make decisions to pull books off the shelves frequently based on sales volume to make room for other titles. Politics or controversy over content do not influence our decisions."
The statement, signed by "Dave," went on to say the movie had renewed interest in the book causing "brisk sales at locations still in stock. Therefore, we have made the decision to reorder the book," added Dave.
Although the book has sold roughly 3,600 copies at Costco and currently occupies the 51st slot on Amazon's bestsellers list, it has surprisingly been kept off the New York Times' bestseller list. A company statement on the Costco Facebook page stated that Costco's national goal was to market books that are on NYT's bestseller list.
But his explanation that it was economics and not ideology that pushed the decision did little to quell the anger. "You are lying. This is VERY POLITICAL....or you would have pulled Hillary's book...which is tanking in sales," wrote Facebook contributor Julie Ann Busch before the decision to restock the book.
"By refusing to sell an anti-Obama book, you come across as a bunch of self-censoring fascists," added Shobhna Kapoor.
D'Souza's book takes aim at the damage that progressive-minded politics has done to America, with an emphasis on the changes that have occurred under President Obama's administration, but he told WND he was surprised to hear that Costco was returning his book to its distributors. "If true, this would be very odd," D'Souza said. "We're in the process of finding out what's happening. I look forward to getting to the bottom of this and continuing the strong relationship my publisher and I have always had with Costco and their millions of shoppers."
