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

Comments

[ext_60155]

I think it is fair that bigger companies are under greater public scrutiny. I did a little research a while back into the question of whether Target and K-Mart were really any better than Wal-Mart as to how they treated their employees, affected local and global economies, etc. What I found (at the time, so it may not be the same now) is that Wal-Mart is really not much worse than its discount store competitors at those things. The difference, though, is that Wal-Mart is about six times larger than Target, so when Wal-Mart does something evil, it causes six times the damage (assuming these things scale linearly, which I think is probably fair). Also, people argue that if you can change the biggest companies, the smaller ones will follow.

I don't know if boycotting affects much. The problem with Wal-Mart, for example, is that even if some people decide they don't want to support the way Wal-Mart does things, there are enough people who care more about everyday low prices than big-picture ideals (or, alternatively, doubt that boycotting does much good). I do think these companies know why people are boycotting them, though. These things often spread around the Internet, and Wal-Mart, at least, is not in the dark about them. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Families_for_Wal-Mart.)

One thing that may have replaced boycotting is enlisting the power of the government to force companies to do certain things. I remember that Chicago was considering a law requiring companies in the city with more than a certain number of employees to pay their workers no less than $10 an hour. You can guess how this idea arose. Not sure what came of it. Also, consider that the powers that be at Wal-Mart are deathly afraid of Barack Obama getting elected, to the point where they have been accused of pressuring managers to vote for John McCain. They know they have a lot to lose if unions gain influence in the federal government.