A USC prof picks up the story in this article:
Boycotts certainly aren't new. My mom had a list of Nestle products our family was prohibited from buying back in the late 1970s because of that company's baby formula policy in poor countries. I once made the mistake of offering Coors beer to a friend of my dad's who was still boycotting the company because of its anti-union position. Some conservative Christians boycott Disney because of perceived pro-gay policies and its annual "Gay Days" event at the Orlando theme parks.
There are websites with entire lists of companies to boycott on both the liberal and conservative sides of the aisles.
Lawrence Glickman, a history professor at the University of South Carolina and author of "Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America," says boycotts are effective at either a local level, where a company's concentrated consumer base is activated, or when a national boycott gains enough steam to create bad publicity and prompt change.
"Probably the most effective boycott along these lines was the United Farm Workers boycott of grapes in the 1970s and early into the 1980s," Glickman says. "The effect was really to raise consciousness about migrant farm labor and working conditions."
Less effective was last year's Whole Foods boycott after CEO John Mackey attacked health-care reform in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
"Liberal shoppers at Whole Foods were upset by this," Glickman said. "Then there were a lot of people who said 'I'm a Libertarian; I'm going to start buying at Whole Foods.' The net result was not much harm to the bottom line" of the chain.Overall, it's hard to see the value of boycotts in the Internet age. You can get a few thousand peopel to oppose anything on Facebook practically overnight. Beyond that, as right vs. left expand their hostilities, the sheer number of boycotts called for expands infinitely. Unless you're a real ideologue about things, you have to start framing categories to keep your boycott standards internally consistent.
Declaring a boycott is one thing. Making it work is another. Once one is declared, it gets a news cycle and then the story vanishes. The conservative American Family Association is notorious for declaring anti-gay boycotts against big corporations, waiting a year or two, and declaring victory. Did they really ever make a dent in the sales at McDonald's or Ford?
You have to consider the situation of corporations getting boycotted, too. Sometimes they are just stuck between a rock and a boycotter. I can see the practicality of the Target/Best Buy buy (couldn't resist that one, either). Dayton-Hudson, Target/Best Buy's parent, is based in Minnesota. You don't generally sit out politics where the politicos can get at you directly.
Internally, Dayton-Hudson has a pretty progressive record of equalizing rights and benefits of its gay employees. The company supports non-company projects and groups as well. Probably somewhere there's an anti-gay Dayton-Hudson boycott going, too.
(An additional wrinkle is the D candidate for governor, Mark Hudson, is a Dayton-Hudson heir. He must have really po'd management when he was a senator).
Here in South Carolina groups are boycotting SC as a state because the Confederate flag still flies at the state capitol. There are people calling for entertainers to boycott Arizona because f its papers-for-the-brown-people law.
There've been sporadic boycotts of BP gas stations around the US and the UK since they invented a new way to deliver oil directly. No doubt the boycotters were well-meaning, but BP stations are mostly franchises, owned by local people Tony Heyward would never go yacht-racing with. So a nice protest idea just grabbed food from the mouths of the boycotters' neighbors and their families.
As consumers we all make the same sorts of blind- or split the middle- choices. We may be concerned about outsourcing of jobs and low wages in overseas sweatshops, but we also like getting a $10 computer keyboard at Wal-Mart from the same oppressed workers. Back when Americans were more attuned to buying US cars, mine was a Ford/Mercury family. I inherited a Ford in the early 1980s.
Once I went through the manuals, it turned out the car was built in socialist Canada.
Personally, I'm not a boycotter. Organized efforts to make me do things are annoying, no matter where and from what inspiration- they come. It's like airline work stoppages.Once I took a vacation, arriving at the airport to find the flight attendants on a work slowdown that the flight mechanics signed onto. Just before departure, the mechanics found a "problem" in my plane. At intervals they sent up word they thought they were close to a fixture. Then they sent up word there were additional complexities.
On the way out of the plane, I mentioned to the flight attendant-in-chief that whatever I might feel about the merits of their pay issues, losing a day of my holiday sitting in an airport terminal in Seattle, dreaming of sunny Palm Springs and fretting over the loss of a pre-paid day by the pool, wasn't gonna do a thing to my view of the airline's management.
So that's about as complicated as I get. For corporations that have to deal with politicians and their incessant demands for money, frankly, it's hard not to find a Republican who's not anti-gay. You just do your thing in the private sector being fair to your employees, and let the election sector sort itself out. It does seem, though, that if the recipient of Target/Best Buy's largess, Bill Emmer, and his supporters, were such purists about being really, comprehensively, anti-gay and not just tossing-hunks-of-red-meat-to-the-base anti-gay, he'd refuse Target's money because they retain their corporate non-discrimination policies.
Who's the hypocrite and who's the pragmatist? Like the party at the end of Animal Farm, it's hard to tell the animals from the humans sometimes.
So where do we all end up?
We exercise choice, I guess. Free markets and Adam Smith and all that. We trade aspects of convenience- closeness to home, price- over offenses to our views. If I know a business owner overtly hostile to an issue or group important to me, I just assume he doesn't want my trade. I can shop elsewhere. Gas stations are ten-a-penny.
Mostly, however, shopping is just a value tranaaction. To Target- or any other store- I am a humanoid money-carrier. I bring money to them, and they give me a vastly marked-up thing in return. Gay people drive in the same direction straight people do- forward- we all just need gas. Don't get in my face about your non-gas-selling views, and I won't get in yours about my non-gas-buying views.
There. Next question?
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