On Boycotts

[lhynard]

I have been considering the idea of boycotting companies and whether or not it has any purpose. Here are some thoughts I've had:

• If I were to be fair in boycotting any given company for a certain issue, I'd probably have to boycott nearly every company, making survival difficult.
  
  • Nearly every company is going to support something(s) with which I do not agree.
  • Nearly every company in today's world is really a combination of multiple companies, which are not always obvious.
• If I had to guess, I would imagine that it is the more popular, bigger companies that are under greater public scrutiny. This is not really fair.
  Could it be possible that the reason you receive e-mails asking you to boycott McDonald's, Wal-Mart, or Disney is because those are bigger name companies, not because they are any worse in what they support than Burger King, Target, or Universal?


• Is boycotting ever going to make much of a difference in today's world anyhow?
  How large of a boycott has to occur before such large companies even feel it anyhow? How many millions of people have to boycott such places before it really hurts them? And how will they know what their "sin" was that triggered the boycott anyhow?

It just seems to me that boycotting doesn't really change anything. I'd imagine that back in the day it may have, but I have a hunch that usually it is no longer an effective source of changing our world.

What has replaced boycotting? I'm not sure, but I'd imagine the Internet would be involved somehow....