The Growing Potential Of The Boycott

Given the last 6 to 9 months, I having been using - perhaps for the first time, certainly more than ever - the power of the personal boycott.

On one hand of course, it has been easier than ever:  with the reduction in ability to do a great many things, I have a great many less things to spend my money on.  But it has also given me the opportunity to really think about - in some fundamental ways - about whom I spend my money with.

The choices are easy in some cases:  where a smaller business, whether local or on-line, will replace a corporate business, I will spend with the smaller business.  In some cases, where the business is clearly opposed to what I consider to be important values, I have stopped spending with them or supporting them altogether.  

I do not mean to pretend that this is a perfect system.  In some cases, there is little choice of who I can spend my money with and so I minimize what I do spend.  But things - and not just purchases, but how I invest my time - have become much more of a conscious exercise.

I do not pretend that my simple actions of not spending are somehow going to impact anyone's bottom line (except, of course, the small businesses whom I do purchase from.  They are always grateful).  But I see the edge of something potentially exciting coming out of a difficult economic and social period:  the boycott may become an actual tool of policy again.

Time was that companies and corporations could shrug off the complaints of a few "crackpots and weirdos" - after all, the economy was good, money was cheap, and the markets were growing.  Sadly, times have changed:  the economy is not good, money is still cheap (but it is being flooded into the market), and markets is at best questionable for the short and mid term due to a combination of increased competition and a rather nasty global economic malaise.  

Suddenly, dollars (or the currency of your choice) matter.

Restaurants, entertainment, retailers - every aspect of the economy is now dependent more than ever on a population buying their products.  And at perhaps an intersection of history as I cannot remember it, a population is now motivated to consider how they are spending their dollars and their time in the face of organizations that support neither their views nor their beliefs.

For most of my lifetime, the assumptions was a corporation or company could act as it pleased with its customer base and overall see no impact.  For the first time in a very long time, that is not true.

I may only be a single person.  But multiple a single person times the thousands or millions, and suddenly, these same corporations may have to start making choices they thought they could avoid.

Your time matters.  Your dollars - the dollars you earn with your hard work and sweat, that represent your life as measured by the time you invested in making them - matter.  Let us put them to work, not only by supporting those whose products we endorse by their craftsmanship and quality, but by investing them in those places where we are appreciated, not ignored or mocked.