It's hard to parse all the double negatives.

But, in general, businesses businesses should generally have a fairly wide latitude as to what the t-shirt slogans they allow customers to wear. (Though I think we can imagine various slogans a business might deem objectionable.)

At the same time, businesses can reasonably have a fairly narrow latitude as to what employees should wear, even barring an official dress code, with respect to even advocating for a specific candidate--and that may even get into matters of company campaigning.

> to what the t-shirt slogans they allow customers to wear.

But the point is that basically nobody would call it a "political" decision if a store allowed customers to wear "vote for Biden/Trump" shirts.

Nobody would call that political, if a store allowed customers to wear those shirts in their store.

Actually I do call it a political decision, but one that is not so controversial in many places in the US - the political decision to value freedom of speech!

In China, for example, while I don’t know for sure I would bet you could not wear a t shirt with the face of say, a former communist party member who had opposed current clique in power (Ie the closest thing to an “opposition” politician that China has).

Or a democracy activist t shirt.

Point is, in the US, though we are lucky in that we often don’t have to think about it, our politicial principles of free speech allow for a lot of behavior.

Stores are demonstrating their political belief in freedom of speech if a store manager doesn’t kick up a fuss when someone walks in wearing a t shirt for a politician the manager dislikes.

Of course there are probably also laws or the manager is savvy enough to know they could get the store sued, but, you get what I’m saying I think / hope :).

You don’t notice it until it’s not there.

And thus, what often appears to be not making a choice, really is making a choice, albeit the default choice :).