Boycotts Rarely Matter

Not the way we’re doing them, anyway.

We live in a time where we are constantly being inundated with the most recent news. Being the way we are, much of it is bad news. For some reason, we seem to crave bad news. We honestly tend to believe bad news over good news as well. We view it as more trustworthy.

Some of the bad news that we’ll receive will be some company doing some horrible thing. It can be anything really. When enough people are outraged, people will often start a boycott. You might get thousands of people to join you! There’s a problem though.

The success of any boycott is usually nonexistent. After all, we’re often boycotting massive companies. Sure, the boycott might drop their sales for a few days, even drop their stock prices. The problem is three fold.

The first problem is we never boycott long enough. We’re all gung ho to vote with our wallets but we’re easily distracted. There’s always something else that will arise that will pull our attention away. That’s one of the downsides to having all this news at our fingertips. Our attention span as a society is barely better than a goldfish’s.

The second problem is after a boycott, many of those who participated will go straight back to using the services of what they were boycotting. This would be fine if the issues were addressed but that rarely happens. How passionate were you really if you can just go back to the status quo so quickly?

The third problem is there are rarely enough people boycotting to really make a difference. With so many different things to be outraged by, it’s unlikely you’ll get the truly enormous amount of people needed to truly affect the target.

If you truly believe something is worth boycotting, you have to go for the long haul. You may end up being one of only a few who are voting with their wallet and that company really won’t care one way or the other. It’s the principle of it though, right? If you can’t do this, why even bother in the first place?

If boycotting is useless, and it generally is, what should we do? We should vote with our wallets but more importantly, we need to lobby for change. Not to the companies themselves. All they care about is their bottom line. We need to speak to the…

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