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

[izaaksmom]

I'm not really sure how to answer this question, but I do know that I personally choose to abstain (as opposed to outright boycotting). I think that boycotting, by definition, needs to be a large majority of people. I am not personally able to motivate groups of people to boycott (mostly due to time issues, rather than skill), although I will continue my small little campaign to get my friends to boycott Family Video.

And grassroots organization does truly work. For example, last year, the show Jericho was going to be cancelled, but fans rallied and flooded CBS with peanuts (something to do with the show, I don't know...) to the tune of about $40,000 worth (28,000 lbs). They ended up extending the show one more year, and made their ratings cut-offs very clear so that fans would be aware of the cancellation the second time around--they also tied up the storyline for them. I don't know, but I would think that if people are willing to do that for a silly TV show, shouldn't change be able to be affected in larger issues as well??