Just some additional advertising for todays boycott.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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boycotts dont work but ill support any attempt at it, sure.
South African apartheid was brought down by a boycott. Another example is the Montgomery bus boycott initiated by Rosa Parks which ended in integrated buses.
Of course, these boycotts lasted for longer than one day. I think if there's enough participation in this single-day boycott, somebody will come up with one that's more sustained.
Neither of those were consumer boycotts though
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.
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.
It's totally possible to never shop at any of these big businesses again.
Maybe not possible for everyone, but for many if not most.
Those small businesses you shop at still get their products from big businesses at the end of the day. Or their workers who you're paying by shopping there will spend money at big businesses. It won't significantly affect the engine that is the economy at the end of the day. Consumer choice only works against specific businesses you can target which if you wanted to have a campaign to for example not to shop at big chain grocery stores that could be good. If anything though that's another mixed message I've seen with this event, is it no spending in general like what a lot of the original fliers for the event said or is it just no spending at big businesses? Either way if your goal is to shut down the economy to show businesses and the government that the people don't want what Trump is doing then you're gonna be much more effective through unions and shutting down workplaces through strikes. If your goal is instead to punish businesses that support Trump that can work depending on the business but needs to be more targeted and there are a lot of companies that even if you try to boycott you'll still end up supporting them indirectly.
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.
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.
Ill be sure not to.
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.
This implies your power only extends to the company you work for. How are we going to change companies with workers outside of our collective interest? How are we going to change Twitter, we aren't going to be able to convince the well paid workers over there to strike because there creating a right wing propaganda machine. How are we going to change companies that exploit labor in the third world? If everyone in the u.s. who worked for temu strikes they could still manufacture and send there cheap plastic over here through the mail.
Your individual power extends to your company. The power of unions extends throughout all of industry. It's why major unions are trying to organize a general strike for 2028. Yes. 2028. And even that is incredibly soon given all the work that needs to be done.
Twitter is not only comprised of "well paid" class traitors. What do you think happens when the people that clean the server rooms don't show up? What happens when the garbage collection at Twitter doesn't show up?
The dock workers union alone was able to get a deal recently just as the threat of a strike. We don't need the support of every single worker (though every one helps. Even the software engineers as they fundamentally share the same class interest). We need an expansive organization, strike funds, and a clear set of demands. This is what is being organized. But every single union that forms gives us more collective power. Yes, even the ones as your small business of 10 employees.
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.