Just some additional advertising for todays boycott.
We need PERMANENT boycotts. DON’T GO BACK!! Abandoned them and leave them to rot.
Follow what I see every Canadian is doing in the grocery store. Look up the brand and if it’s American put it back and add to the permanent no buy list.
As an American I use Goods Unite Us to look up political contributions before buying
I second this app, I’m a big fan of the campaign finance reform score. If you want an easy way to fight the citizens united ruling, this is it.
Also want to give a shout out to https://www.opensecrets.org/. their site isn’t as easy to use as goods, but the have a lot more data and if you can’t find info about a company or politician on goods you can usually still find it on open secrets.
If your protest is convenient it’s a shitty protest. I’m sorry, but this is a shitty protest.
I’m sure this one day boycott will be just as effective as the others were.
If you want results you need to put in time and have a target. Conservatives didn’t boycott beer, they boycotted Bud Light. They didn’t do it for a day, they did it until Bud Light gave up. Say what you will about the “why” of it, but it was effective.
I posted another comment but they are effective if strong enough. If their metrics crash today it will worry them. Later if it can be followed up by two days, three, a week. Its a message. There are some more targeted ones on the calendar to. Might have actually been more effective for the artist to do a remember one yesterday but then again its nice to do a solidarity one today. We shall see how much people care to send a message or not.
You’re assuming anybody outside of Lemmy even knows about this. I haven’t seen any indication of that.
why not boycott all major corporations every day? it does require a bit of work, but the more money you spend locally, the better your local communities will be
That’s just not how our economy works. “Local” business is not making toilet paper from trees they cut down in their backyard.
I’m probably getting downvoted for this but I hate hate hate this “consumption is power” bull shit boycotts. Consumption is NOT power. LABOR is power. If you work at these large companies you have a million times more power and influence by organizing.
Boycott today if it makes you feel good. But it’s so incredibly missing of the point that I have to assume it is purposely missing the point of collective power.
Your power is in your ability to withhold labor. Not withholding consumption for one day that you’ll just buy the next day. Hell, if these planned organized single day boycotts, if they actually had an impact, would be a way to maximize profits to reduce labor requirements for those days. It’s so silly.
Organize your workplace. That is where your power is!
100%, but why not both? amazon only got that big because we keep buying from it (that and all the government contracts). buying from local stores that also buy from local stores is the best from a purchasing aspect. and as far as data, that’s massively more important and valuable to them than your $
Why tf do I keep seeing posts about boycotts and protests the day they’re happening
Because unfortunately the point of these protests isn’t achieving change, it’s patting themselves on the back for their “positive action” (despite how conveniently non-intrusive said action is their lives and how it requires absolutely zero risk or material sacrifice).
Since the point is to self-congratulate, no reason to wait, I guess.
Hahaha this boycott was Dead on arrival
“One day boycott with no terms or conditions, that’ll show em!”
I mean, I’ll still do it because why not? It’s easy (which is part of the issue), but like…this will do nothing.
A one day boycott is a start. It will get people thinking about where and when they buy stuff. And maybe thinking about other things and the possibility of doing them. Like a general strike.
The way I see it, you have to start small before you can go big. Get people used to the idea so when you call for a general strike later, it doesn’t seem totally outlandish.
Organizing around denying consumption is the exact opposite of what a general strike would do. This does nothing but make people feel like nothing they do matters because it’s focusing on the exact opposite of what we should be organizing on. We should be organizing around labor.
I can’t tell if these online “consumption power” movements are just a reflection of the complete lack of class consciousness. Or if they are planned distractions that are designed to fail to make people feel powerless. I think it’s a bit of both.
So… anything is a comic strip nowadays it seems.
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Boycotts do work. Starbucks has actually had to admit their sales went down due to the boycott. The problem is that these things take time and doing a boycott for a day or a week doesn’t really impact these corpos bottom line where they actually notice.
Yeah their sales went down, but did it change anything about the way they do business?
Not yet, but I don’t plan on stopping
Cool, just don’t mistake mobilization for actual organizing.
It’s different when targeting a specific business as that kind of boycott can continue indefinitely. A boycott against spending any money or going to any business can only last so long and therefore companies will see a downturn and then probably a spike in sales as people buy a bunch of stuff at once that they were planning to buy during the boycott. I agree with the other comments that organizing workplaces to eventually form the base for a real general strike would be a more effective strategy to actually hurt businesses.
again these are initial salvos. they will notice a massive dip for one day. there are other more targeted ones.
Ok, but what is a massive drop in sales? $100K, $1 billion, $1 trillion? Because Bezos makes $26 million per day, so for them to notice we need to create between $100 million to $1 billion loss, but also we can’t just go immediately back to normal afterwards because they are expecting this.
Its going to depend on the company. The main thing is when they present their powerBI graph that the dip is significant. This would be divisional as well because I believe most of amazons profits now come from aws but not 100% on that but they will have a team that talks just about orders from the site I assure you.
Exactly. Withholding consumption is not where our collective power is. Withholding Labor is where our collective power is. These “consumer power” movements are so incredibly capitalist brained. Our working class is so brain rotted by capitalism that they can only think of “power in the hand of consumers” which is one of the biggest most obvious lies capitalist tell.
I once read a quote by someone that went roughly like “Voting with your wallet means the ones with the biggest wallets get the most votes” and it has stuck with me ever since.
Lots of naysayers trying to convince everyone not to participate, or to fragment efforts with competing ideas.
So much of our consumer culture is buying shit we don’t need like impulse buys and stupid movies and fast food. That’s profitable stuff, and skipping that for one day doesn’t mean you’ll just buy it the next day.
Open letter to everyone who pooh-poohs this:
Participation is never useless. If you’re looking at this through the lens of “will this fix everything,” well of course it won’t. That’s because small efforts by themselves are not impactful.
But lots of small efforts, cumulative, over time, can be, and you have to start somewhere. Everyone who resists does so by taking on some amount of personal risk. Yes, this boycott is a very small personal risk. That’s fine. It will get people involved who were previously not involved. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
We need those people. We need their support, in whatever ways they are able to offer it. If your message is “don’t bother, it won’t work,” you are telling people not to be involved. If your aims are, for example, “armed revolution,” and you’re only considering the people who have the weapons and use them, you are completely ignoring all other aspects of conflict. In war, the people who pull the triggers are a minority of the opposing forces.
You have to produce equipment, food, clothing, shelter. You have to deliver those things where they are needed. You have to know where those things are needed. You need to plan and organize and communicate. You need to provide medical services.
And you have to do all those things not only for the “front line troops,” but for everyone.
Today’s boycotter can become tomorrow’s marcher, next week’s smuggler, next month’s partisan. Or medic. Or kitchen. Or driver.
All efforts, great and small. !Resist@fedia.io
Hey, did you know that half of all day to day retail spending is done by the economically top 10% of the US population.
These are people who for the most part don’t care about economic hardships of the lower classes and have closer to 65% of the liquid assets.They already under spend for their wealth and likely also won’t care about this. And will spend or not and make no impact.
Not to be negative, but to be realistic.
This is pointless.
Like literally without a point or purpose but to “show those business we mean business” and that isn’t an actual point and they don’t care about a 1 day shopping freeze.The reach on this with it already being the day of the protest is already a major hinderance to any progress hoped to be achieved and then we still don’t have a point.
Honestly we need to be deciding what change we actually want to have occur and start steering the ship that way little action at a time as possible but instead let’s just keep trying to make 1 day events a thing with the shock the wealthy see of us standing together enough to make them see the light of God and turn around and change for us. I’m sure that will eventually work even though it never has.
I disagree. Your post is long but boils down to “I don’t think it will work.” Im fine if you choose to do it to humor us and would appreciate it.
It’s “I don’t think it will work immediately, for my specific goals.”
Are you speaking for me?
@HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com said:
Your post is long but boils down to “I don’t think it will work.”
My comment was an indication of what I think your post boils down to.
As someone comfortably in that top 10% and unfathomably infinitely outside the billionaire club, I hope you know I’m on your side, and I do care.
Annecdotaly, the majority of my peers are as well.
Our complacency is a huge part of the problem.
But for what it’s worth, we’re increasingly waking up to the fact that we’re also quite fucked by what the billionaires are up to, in the long run.
Got food at the local donut shop. Ate lunch and dinner from a food truck. The real way this could work is if everyone does this everyday and avoids non local chains.
The poor get mud water called Tim Horton’s, as their rents double and they are forced to fund our government buying 50% of all mortgage bonds to reward existing asset holders.
Maybe if we rout out the corruption we can achieve a higher standard of living and allow productivity investment, so Canadians can afford nice coffee from a mom and pop establishment whose rents are also ballooning.
If anyone is interested this was apparently started by a group called The People’s Union. I get that 1 day isn’t that impactful in the grand scheme of things, cuz it’s not. But it’s about organization. It’s about coordination.
So what I dont understand is, even if one were to do a week long blackout of buying anything, we would still need to get milk and eggs and crap. So is the idea to switch from amazon to other stores or not spend altogether? Because not spending altogether is a pretty stupid and unrealistic goal.
My main complaint is that anything not bought on the day of the blackout will just be bought the following day.
Better protest is to act as if there is a recession. Buy only what you need, and if possible seek an alternative from a smaller manufacturer. As aways don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
What is the protest though? What are the demands and how will we know when they are achieved?
The best answer I can get in these threads is to “send a message” of “general discontent”, but protests just don’t really work that way.
Decide what you want and figure out what to boycott in order to harm the people that are able to grant it.
Maybe make a trivial amount of effort to find those details yourself.
It’s a response to the active class warfare happening, including the anti-DEI efforts.
Targeted boycotts aren’t enough anymore. Too many major corporations, often without adequate competition, are working against us.
Sorry, the article you linked doesn’t list any demands.
The closest it comes is this:
an act of “economic resistance” to protest what the group’s founder sees as the malign influence of billionaires, big corporations and both major political parties on the lives of working Americans.
This demonstrates my point really. There’s a general sense of dissatisfaction with billionaires and with capitalism, but there are no demands. If you’re not demanding anything, how will you know when you have achieved your goal?
This is really part of it, but it’s not included explicitly in that article like it should be.
Other activists, faith-based leaders and consumers already are organizing boycotts to protest companies that have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and to oppose President Donald Trump’s moves to abolish all federal DEI programs and policies.
Sorry, what I’m trying to explain is that protests require specific demands.
If a protest like this got any traction, companies could just say “ok we’re listening, we will think about reinstating some DEI things”.
European here. So how did this go yesterday? News coverage?
When you find out most of the people live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford to buy in bulk, or don’t even have a place to store it because they live in an apartment, is when you realize that only a certain privileged subset of them is able to participate in this type of passive protests…
I mean, I’ve been very poor. Not buying is the easy part when you’re poor - buying stuff is the hard part, so not sure what your point is on this one.
Before anyone decides to reply to this person’s comment or reads it and thinks they’re being legitimate, read their replies to me.
They’re arguing in bad faith to undermine any protests and don’t care at all about whether someone is poor or not.
They’re arguing in bad faith
Who the fuck is arguing? You must be a retard who gets triggered and fights everyone. Did you just come from reddit? Lmao
Buy Nothing Day has existed since the 1990s — I believe that Kalle Lassen popularized it in his ADBUSTERS monthly.
Coverage in AP and NPR is amazing progress.
