The past year there has been a lot of new focus on consumption habits, particularly consumer boycotts. They’re a common topic of discussion in the various progressive sub-reddits and other communities I’m in, and I see two things happen with the most frequency.
The first is people absolutely falling over themselves for validation that they’re either boycotting correctly or that they’re allowed to make an exception. Someone asking if they can still recycle their car seat at Target even if they don’t use the coupon. Is that against the rules of the boycott? Guilt over being given an Amazon gift card for Christmas when they didn’t have any control over that and therefore bear no responsibility for the purchase.
Another thing happens when someone raises a very valid concern, critique, or disagreement about the nature or intentions behind a boycott. Instead of it engendering conversation, that person is very often shamed or dismissed. “You people just can’t give up anything” gets thrown around so much as an admonishment that it shuts down any conversations about consumer boycott efficacy in both the specific and conceptual.
What I feel like I’m seeing is progressives and leftists using boycotts as a sort of ethical shield and bludgeon combo. Instead of actually thinking about their own ideologies and examining the flow of their money through the economy, they just want a list of where to shop (or not shop) that will make them a good person.
However where you don’t buy is only one small part of your economic footprint. Where you do buy and how much can have a much heavier long-term effect. It’s also easier to manage in the day-to-day than an ever-changing and expanding list of blanket “don’t buy” lists.
There was a lot of discussion of the recent Target lent boycott in one of the forums I frequent, and someone said “I’ve stopped shopping at Target at all! Now I just go to Costco three times a week.” There wasn’t any additional context to tell whether this was a joke or not, but I also know people for whom it wouldn’t be. And even if it’s just picking up one thing while you’re there for the food court, doing that multiple times a week is still illustrative of a tricky relationship with consumerism.
You have to do that initial work of “what do my spending habits look like?” What are you spending your money on, and does it support a low-waste, smart consumption lifestyle? Are you making good choices? Are you intentional in what you buy and how you buy it? Can you adequately separate your needs from your wants? Because when you establish that at the baseline, when you want to “weaponize your wallet” you have more solid things to build on.
It was maybe ten days out from the end of the lent Target boycott before I even knew it was happening. I still successfully “completed it” because I just don’t really shop at Target that often. I can’t pinpoint any reason to go there at all, right now. I’ve been to Walmart maybe three times in the last year, and two of those trips were the neighborhood market for a last minute food item for dinner. And these aren’t intended to be flexes, they’re just reflections of my shopping habits.
There’s very little I need from a place like Target, and I don’t need it often.
I’m sort of neutral on the act of shopping. It’s not something I generally go out to do just to do. Ninety percent of the time, I don’t even walk into a store until I have a small list of items I’m on the lookout for. That doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally partake of the sensible off-list purchase, but by sheer virtue of opportunity, those occurrences are limited.
There are only three instances where I just walk in and buy on complete impulse: Half-Price Books (or one of the local indie stores), my local comic shops, and at big conventions/events/artisan markets. You set me loose in an anime con artist alley or the Renaissance faire, I wake up in a daze afterward with a backpack full of goat-milk soap and enamel pins.
That’s the next consideration, though. Where are you shopping as opposed to where you aren’t? There’s about $2000-$3000 worth of wall art scattered throughout my home acquired over the space of a decade and a half. With the exception of a couple of gifts and framed comics, most of them were purchased directly from a small independent artist. Is it over-consumptive? Eh, I don’t know, maybe. It’s literally money going into the hands of someone trying to make a living from their art, though, so I’m not going to stop while I have the finances to do so.
All my books come from Bookshop, Thriftbooks, or HPB, and I actively shop diverse authors when buying new. My comics come from an LCS or a specialty online store. My LEGOS come straight from the company. I have a specialty hair care product that I source from a smallish Leaping Bunny approved company that ticks all the ethical sourcing checkboxes I can find. My favorite body butter is from a small, local, black-owned business. Our toilet paper is from a company that does recycled paper. I back a handful of Kickstarter’s a year for small studios and thrift digital media from a local store that sponsor’s a children’s charity.
My focus is toward things as opposed to away, and the rest of my spending habits follow behind naturally. The whole idea being that when I do have to bend to the will of capitalism for whatever reason, a significant portion of my money is still directly going into the hands of people, companies, and charities I actively want to support.
Because the final element that brings this all together is being pragmatic. Perfectly ethical consumption is functionally impossible, and we’re constantly living under that knowledge.
You have circumstances that seem very easy on the surface: a specific artist or an individual company does some something unsavory. Just don’t buy that art or brand or eat at that establishment. But even that immediately opens the question, well what if I just engage with fanwork? What’s the over-under on the ethics of pirating a book by a terrible person? What if it’s the only fast-food place available on this twelve hour road trip? What if it’s the only brand of formula my kid can eat?
You barely dig into this process before running up caveats and questions. And it’s very easy to dismiss these small “what ifs,” but if you’re looking at someone who doesn’t know how to think about these issues yet, they want concrete answers.
Now imagine we move up the ladder to multi-national conglomerates with their fingers in hundreds of pies.
Amazon’s operating costs mostly come from its web services with another large chunk of its revenue from ads and marketing. That’s not to say do or don’t shop with them, but rather to contextualize what your money as a consumer on the retail side actually means for Amazon’s bottom line.
BDS, at one point, had a call out for a consumer boycott of some computer manufacturers (Dell, HP, Intel). Realistically, how often are you as an individual buying computer components where that would matter? The real money, consistently, for those kinds of companies are corporate and government contracts. Again, not to say either way on whether you should or shouldn’t boycott, but rather perspective on what your money actually does in those circumstances. And whether there’s a different avenue in which your specific energies would be of more active or better value.
Check out this thread about still intact DEI policies, and see the way the goalposts move around for some of these companies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXPreppers/comments/1iavpk1/full_list_of_companies_supporting_dei_effort
Famously homophobic Chick-fil-A actually adjusted their donations to no longer support anti-LGBTQIA organizations in 2019, and they still have their DEI page up when a lot of other companies have taken them down. Where does that put them ethically in terms of being a boycott target? Does that change their alignment with your individual ideologies and perception of money flow?
You have to have the intellectual flexibility to figure these things out as they come because real life has more variables and complexities than a bulk list online can accurately cover at all times. If you’re waiting for an external force to tell you if you’re shopping ethically or not, then you’re disconnected from your own ideologies. And if you’re disconnected, how do you expect to press for and maintain long-term change?
For people to get to that point across the board, online progressive communities have to be able to allow justified disagreement over the premise or the details of a boycott without it devolving into shame and useless virtue signaling. And while we should all be holding each other to a higher standard of care in our consumption, there also has to be room for grace for yourself and other people when everyone is just trying to do the best they can with what they have.
Pixels and Pins Studio 