this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Just some additional advertising for todays boycott.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

boycotts dont work but ill support any attempt at it, sure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 54 minutes ago

boycotts dont work

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

again these are initial salvos. they will notice a massive dip for one day. there are other more targeted ones.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah their sales went down, but did it change anything about the way they do business?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Not yet, but I don't plan on stopping

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Cool, just don't mistake mobilization for actual organizing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Ill be sure not to.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago

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.