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Consumer Boycotts
Date: 2022
From: Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection
Publisher: Gale, a Cengage Company
Document Type: Topic overview
Length: 2,089 words
Content Level: (Level 5)
Lexile Measure: 1380L
Full Text:
A consumer boycott is a means of protest in which consumers abstain from purchasing products or services from a specific company,
industry, or political jurisdiction. Boycotts have stemmed from consumers’ concerns over violations of human and civil rights, fair labor
practices, animal rights, environmental causes, and other issues. Consumer boycotts played a significant role in the US civil rights
movement, perhaps most famously when a boycott led to the end of segregation on city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956.
With the internet and digital communications technologies facilitating the global spread of information faster than ever before, activists
in the twenty-first century have increasingly harnessed these tools to launch boycott and divestment campaigns on local, national,
and international levels. However, some critics question the efficacy of consumer boycotts to achieve social or political change in the
twenty-first century.
Pros and Cons of Consumer Boycotts
Pros
Consumer boycotts offer a way to leverage international opposition to a cause, policy, or practice.
When workers at a company go on strike or their efforts to unionize are threatened, boycotts are a way consumers show
solidarity with workers.
Advances in technology have provided new ways to present, share, and access important boycott information to a greater
number of consumers.
Cons
Boycotts are ineffective because they often do not hold the attention of the news media, social media, and the public for a
sustained period of time.
In an era of multinational corporations, a boycott will not amass enough consumer participants to impact a company’s bottom
line.
Consumers may be reluctant to stop buying certain products or may have been unlikely to purchase a targeted product in the
first place.
Types of Consumer Boycotts
Boycotts may be organized to draw attention to widespread abuses that go far beyond the behavior of a company or an individual.
For example, abolitionists in Britain began to abstain from eating sugar produced by enslaved people in British colonies in 1791.
Similarly, in the Free Produce movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, Quaker abolitionists in the United States opened
stores that sold only goods made without the labor of enslaved people. These boycotts did not force companies using the labor of
enslaved people out of business or lead immediately to the abolition of slavery. However, they focused attention on business owners’
and consumers’ complicity in the slave trade when choosing to buy and sell certain goods.
Boycotts related to environmentalism and conservation succeeded at persuading major companies to cease animal testing on
cosmetics products, stop producing or selling fur products, and implement “no deforestation” policies, among others. A 2021 survey
by Dentsu International found that nearly 60 percent of respondents expressed a willingness to boycott companies that they believed
failed to adopt more proactive environmental policy.
Entire countries have been the more recent subject of boycotts, as well. For example, 170 Palestinian organizations joined together in
2005 to launch the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. The movement calls for a boycott of Israel and Israeli products
until Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank, stops discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and allows Palestinian
refugees to return to their homes.
A boycott on products and brands linked to the forced labor of Uyghur Muslims in China emerged in the late 2010s when over eighty
international brands, including Nike, The North Face, Gap, and H&M, were identified as benefitting from such labor. In a globalized
economy, a consumer boycott may lead to different but related boycotts. For instance, under mounting pressure from domestic and
international human rights groups, in 2021 the US government enacted a law halting all cotton imports from the Xinjiang region, home
to the Uyghur ethnic minority.
While boycotts involve consumers pledging not to patronize a business, industry, or country, a divestment campaign involves
lobbying stockholders to stop investing in entities associated with alleged abuses such as forced labor or environmental degradation.
A divestment campaign from 1977 to 1989 that focused on South African apartheid contributed to the dismantling of the apartheid
system beginning in 1989. As just one part of a decades-long struggle that involved demonstrations, negotiations, and acts of civil
disobedience, the divestment campaign offered a way to leverage international opposition to apartheid.
Divestment campaigns often focus on larger entities to magnify their impact. For example, in 2011, US students active in fighting
climate change began urging their universities to stop investing in fossil fuel corporations. The campaign has extended beyond the
United States and college campuses. For example, in 2021 Maine became the first US state to pass a law requiring all state funds be
divested from fossil fuels.
In what has been termed a “buycott,” consumers purchase a product to demonstrate their support of a company. In some cases, the
company being supported is the subject of a boycott by a different consumer group. For example, in 2022 the workwear company
Carhartt was criticized by people opposed to vaccine mandates. The company had kept its COVID-19 vaccine policy in place despite
a US Supreme Court ruling that deemed the federally imposed mandate on large employers unconstitutional. While groups opposed
to mandates called for a boycott, those supportive of employer vaccination mandates called for a buycott.
Other types of boycotts may focus on a particular individual, and some commentators consider so-called cancel culture campaigns to
be a form of boycott. Such campaigns typically involve calls to boycott the work of a specific person, usually someone with public
prominence such as a politician, writer, performer, or celebrity, who has been deemed to have acted or spoken in an unacceptable
manner.
Some boycott campaigns raise awareness about structural societal issues. Buy Nothing Day, first organized in Canada in the 1990s,
is observed in many countries as a protest against consumerism and consumer debt. In the United States, Buy Nothing Day is
observed the day after Thanksgiving, often called Black Friday, a day more often associated with shopping sprees and discount
sales.
Showing Solidarity with Workers
Boycotts have played a crucial role in the US labor movement. Consumers use boycotts to show solidarity with workers who are on
strike or attempting to unionize for better, safer, and fairer working conditions. In 1965 farmworkers who picked grapes in Delano,
California, went on strike to protest low wages and demand recognition of their union, the United Farm Workers (UFW). C\u00e9sar
Ch\u00e1vez and Dolores Huerta, the UFW’s founders, called for a consumer boycott of California grapes. Organizers nationwide
coordinated boycott activities, causing a dramatic drop in sales. In 1970 grape companies signed union contracts with the UFW that
provided for higher wages and better working conditions.
The Delano grape boycott demonstrated the impact a consumer boycott can have on workers’ rights. Consumer boycotts continue in
part because most consumers are also workers and employees. Many consumers do not want to patronize companies that do not
treat their workers with fairness and dignity. For example, calls to boycott online giant Amazon to protest the working conditions in
their warehouses have been ongoing since 2011. Activists renewed criticism of Amazon in late 2021 after six employees died when a
tornado destroyed a warehouse in Illinois. Surviving warehouse workers and cargo drivers reported being told to keep working
despite shelter-in-place orders during the tornado warning, bringing into question the ethics of the company’s worker health and
safety policies.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many corporations have been targets of boycotts to support workers. For example, in early 2020
some groups called on consumers to boycott delivery apps and driving services such as Doordash, Instacart, Lyft, and Uber to
support workers’ demands for company-supplied personal protective equipment. Also in early 2020, groups called for meat boycotts
due to unsafe working conditions at the nation’s meatpacking plants. Some plants, such as those owned by Colorado-based JBS,
were found not to have implemented social distancing or safety precautions, and to have asked workers to come to work despite a
statewide stay-at-home order. At one plant more than three hundred workers got sick with COVID-19 and six died. According to the
Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), between April 2020 and September 2021, nearly sixty thousand meatpacking
workers in the United States contracted COVID-19 and about three hundred died.
In 2021 workers at a Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas, went on strike to protest poor working conditions and so-called “suicide
shifts,” which refer to forced overtime that left workers with only eight hours between shifts. The striking workers called for a
consumer boycott of Frito-Lay products, which include snack brands such as Doritos, Tostitos, and Sun Chips.
Similarly, when workers at all four US Kellogg Company cereal plants went on strike in October 2021, they called for consumer
support through boycotting Kellogg products. Labor leaders have highlighted how workers at the plant had been working seven-day
weeks and sixteen-hour shifts during pandemic lockdowns while company executives received bonuses. Despite public support for
the approximately 1,400 striking workers, Kellogg attempted to replace workers rather than continue negotiating, increasing public
support in solidarity with the workers. After a seventy-seven-day strike, the workers approved a collective bargaining agreement and
went back to work.
Critical Thinking Questions
What are the differences between a consumer boycott and a divestment campaign? Which strategy do you believe is the
more effective form of activism?
In what ways, if any, do you think the COVID-19 pandemic has affected consumer participation in boycotts? Explain your
answer.
Do you think that bringing negative media attention to a company’s practices during a boycott campaign is more important
than affecting the target’s profits? Why or why not?
Launching a Successful Boycott
Some analysts argue boycotts are ineffective at forcing change. They contend boycotts cannot attract enough participants to affect
sales of a large, multinational corporation and that when some buyers divest others invest. They also suggest people who support the
goals of a boycott may be reluctant to stop buying their favorite products, may have been unlikely to purchase a targeted product in
the first place, or may be incapable of participating due to factors beyond their control. For example, some persons with disabilities
may not be able to support a boycott of straws or other single-use plastic items or of specific delivery and transportation options.
Others may not have access to or be able to afford an alternative product. In addition, experts argue that as other topics gain ground
on social media, boycott campaigns may struggle to garner needed media attention.
Boycott experts at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management estimate, among boycotts receiving national media
attention, about 25 percent led to a concession by the company. Such concessions, however, are not spurred solely or simply by a
decrease in sales. Instead, boycotts succeed because they damage a brand’s reputation, which requires sustained media attention. A
bruised reputation can make investors sell off stock or become reluctant to buy it. As a company may need to engage in substantial
efforts to restore its reputation, a boycott can lead to dramatic changes beyond the campaign’s original scope.
Some economists argue a successful boycott must be strategic in selecting its targets. They recommend focusing on a single policy
or company, even if the campaign ultimately has a larger scope, and targeting a practice many consumers will oppose. The campaign
must focus on a product that potential participants would buy if not for the boycott. Consumers are also more likely to engage in
boycotts that do not require them to spend significantly more money to acquire a substitute.
In an era of massive corporations and a globalized economy, it can be difficult to launch a successful boycott. However, technological
advances facilitate the sharing of tactics and other information. For example, some consumers found boycotting Frito-Lay and
Kellogg’s almost impossible, as these companies are multinational conglomerates that own a vast range of brands. Therefore, many
calls for boycotting Frito-Lay that circulated on social media included infographics showing all implicated brands. Smartphone apps
such as Buycott enable users to check whether a product is related to a company or brand they do not want to patronize. In addition,
some consumer boycotts have specialized smartphone apps.
Consumer boycotts have become a more mainstream form of activism in the United States, arguably due to young people’s
unprecedented access to information and leverage of digital tools. A survey by CompareCards found the share of Americans
currently boycotting at least one company rose from 26 percent in 2019 to 38 percent in 2020. More than half of Americans ages
eighteen to thirty-nine indicated they were currently boycotting at least one company in 2020, a figure that fell to 37 percent among
people ages forty to fifty-four and 22 percent among consumers ages fifty-five to seventy-four.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2022 Gale, a Cengage Company
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
“Consumer Boycotts.” Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale, 2022. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,
link.gale.com\/apps\/doc\/XDDLXD810134191\/OVIC?u=mnaconcordia&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=943d6118. Accessed 5 Apr.
2022.
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