Just some additional advertising for todays boycott.
I work at a Costco in Western Canada. Today (28th) was a little slower than slower than normal, but well inside the normal ups and downs we see. All of us are curious to see if the 1st is busier to make up for it.
Everybody will just buy more shit tomorrow. Are you people afraid of going into the streets?
I didn’t know about this and still participated by accident. What I’m trying to say is that if 1 day counts as boycott I’m severely concerned by the overreliance the general public has on those companies.
Who organizes this shit??? Can I learn about this ahead of time so I don’t see the post literally at 10:30 on the night of the same day??
Like literally
Do you know about the nationwide general strike on March 14th?
There’s also a national protest on march 4th, check out !50501@piefed.social for more info!
ive seen this promoted all over the place for weeks
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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.
Without any replacements, this boycott isn’t going to last. We should be promoting alternatives with the blackout too. Costco isn’t available everywhere.
Organising is now just posting the day of
Like, i didn’t buy anything today not because of protest, just because i didn’t need too… Stuff like this will not be noticed
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.
While this is par for the course for me, I imagine lots of people across the states have had their local stores run out of town over the years, making this much harder. Other times, local stores are more expensive at a time when people really can’t be paying more.
Hopefully, it does help by getting people to consider local where they can. But I do think some people vastly overestimated this one day.
Ate lunch and dinner from a food truck.
Where did they get their produce from? Probably Walmart.
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.
It costs next to nothing to make coffee.
Retailers don’t give a shit about nobody buying anything on a particular day, if they’re all back the next.
This is a stupid idea.
“That’s not going to do anything” They said, sitting on their asses, doing nothing, while others fought for change.
You can find this style of argument in virtually all discussions about protests and about whether they are okay or even effective.
Idk & idgaf, but you can’t deny, that this makes the whole issue a lot more visible than just doing nothing.
First, not going shopping for one day isn’t “fighting for change”, it’s doing the bare minimum to feel like you’re actually doing something.
Second, boycotts work, absolutely, but this isn’t a boycott. This won’t affect the overall sales numbers of these stores, just move them to a different day.
Finally, what are their demands exactly?
you can’t deny, that this makes the whole issue a lot more visible than just doing nothing.
Yes I can. Because what fucking issue is this about? What are the goals this protest is trying to achieve?
Making a fuss about nothing, and doing nothing with any lasting effect, is not a protest.
I mean the point of it isn’t to deprive retailers of one day of profits altogether, it’s to show how much a sustained refusal to shop would hurt them. Whether or not it’s effective depends on how many people participate.
I don’t think it’s going to be effective, but I’m not going to be the reason it’s not. I can pick up my dish soap tomorrow
Another thing it does is helps people realize what power they have, even if one day of boycotting has zero impact on the economy or businesses. It gets those people who are participating started taking action, and thinking about their actions in the context of politics.
It’s a very easy first step, and if people find that they can do a day, maybe they’ll be okay with trying a week next time, or maybe showing up at a town hall seems easier. This is arguably more about getting people involved in the movement than actually sticking it to the corporations/oligarchy. That will come. But asking people who live paycheck to paycheck to boycott corporations for more than 2 weeks would be a huge ask without building up to it first.
This. It gets people used to the idea and shifts the Overton window of protesting, if you will. It’s only the conservatives over on lemm.ee that don’t like that idea.
I don’t knock the fact that things need to be done, but a general strike would be more effective if you want them to notice what an economic blackout would look and feel like. No company is looking at profits at a one day scale, so point blank, no one up top is going to see any effect from this. The fact people are still going to get what they need, but just on a different day means the only ones who noticed this or were affected by it were the ones who participated not the rich fucks getting paid tomorrow instead of today. We need to work towards tangible goals that have something that can be measured and affect real change, not cause more people to feel apethic when their efforts go unrewarded.
Yeah, this is basically a trial balloon. How many people can we get to do this thing? Then, once you know, organize something that packs a bit more punch.
I mean the point of it isn’t to deprive retailers of one day of profits altogether, it’s to show how much a sustained refusal to shop would hurt them. Whether or not it’s effective depends on how many people participate.
yeah but its not a question of whether or not it would hurt them, the answer is yes, you cant make money if people don’t buy shit.
Weird little story, but i’ve never seen a company do any sort of accounting for this kind of problem.
Having worked retail sales earlier in my life and working as a developer in e-commerce in later parts, single day drops mean nothing. They’re often a statical anomalies, even when there is a “reason” for it. If the business is short on monthly or quarterly goals they can always make up a single day loss with a strategic sale or product marketing & placement.
If we really want to hurt these companies, we need to orgaize larger than a single day of “fuck you”. A single day might be good for awareness, but TBH, it’s comes across more as virtue signaling and enabling social media bragging “I’m doing my part for TODAY”.
All that said, I am doing my part for today, and have been doing my part for quite some time now, and will continue doing my part for the coming months and years.
It makes me think this is more of an effort to get people to feel apathetic. Get them trying to do something that they thought might create change but had no real material effect. What we need is a general strike if we want them to take notice. No garbage man cleaning the trash, no janitor cleaning the shit stains in their executive office, no valet making them park themselves, no drivers to drive their drunk coked up asses around, no cooks to prep their meals, no assistant reminding them they can’t keep track of their head without the people they try and fuck on a daily basis. That is something that even just a day would have them shitting bricks, and with no one to clean up for them, they would have to fester in the shit show they have made. That’s the only way we get them to take notice and realize the masses are serious about change.
I used to deliver pizza, a long time ago.
The weather had a huge effect on sales, not just overall volume, but time and whether people ordered delivery or collected.
On cold and rainy days, for example, we got hammered on deliveries.
The people running big stores know this, they aren’t stupid.
Not only that but I haven’t seen a single actionable demand by the advertisements for this campaign. It’s a hollow, confused threat that simply doesn’t make sense.
Ironically I haven’t spent money anywhere today but that’s just because I spend most of my life trying not to pay giant chain retailers.
If someone wanted this campaign to work they would have united the whole thing under a banner or a brand, declared that this was not the first protest they would be staging, say something like: “this is only a threat, if companies don’t do X in 3 months we will organize a week-long blackout. Then if they don’t do anything after that week-long blackout we’ll do another one for two weeks or a month.”
That makes sense. That’s negotiation and it’s how you demonstrate the power the people hold.
The X should be something policy-based and actionable. It can be a huge sweeping demand but it has to be actionable. It should not be a laundry list of long term demands. Then, when you get that first demand met you can delay action and keep pushing later since you’ve proven the tactics work.
Compare that to what this protest is doing. It’s pretty far-cry.
I haven’t seen a single actionable demand by the advertisements for this campaign.
That is also a massive issue I have with this. What, exactly, do you want?
Its not a bad idea on its face. A sudden and sizeable shift in public economic activity on a given day would be meaningful if it could be invoked to put on pressure at strategic moments.
But “collective inaction” isn’t enough. I might have taken this more seriously if they were paired with pickets. Perhaps for a reason more explicit than “We’re generically unhappy!” Or if they came from someone I actually know, rather than a graphic plastered on my computer screen.
These seem like political action cosplay. If you’re not in a movement and you’re not using this time to coordinate further actions… hell, you’re not even asking where this meme came from or who authored it… then what are you doing? How is this different than Valentine’s Day, where you see a bunch of memes that tell you to go out and spend extra money? Who are you sticking it to?
That’s the other reason I dislike this idea, “we’re generically unhappy” isn’t really going to change hearts and minds.
You need a specific, actionable goal if you want something to actually change.
Boycott the companies that ditched their DEI initiatives until they bring them back.
What if my actionable goal is crashing the broken economy that’s burning our planet?
Buy fertiliser and diesel.
Everyone knows that puts you on a list
That’s not true, companies are plenty worried about this sort of thing. Look at how Bud light panicked over the kid rock boycott. If he can do it, anyone can.
I have no idea what you’re talking about here, what happened with Kid Rock?
if they’re all back the next.
Don’t worry, nobody is going to buy anything on February 29 either.
The image fits, a kid throwing a tantrum, cause it’s really all they can do. I mean it’s nice to give the staff a slow day but the corporation and the people on top won’t even notice it
P.s. sabotage costs them more
Funny enough the only people who are going to feel it are the low level retail managers who are going to get yelled at for not meeting their YoY, and then not a peep the next day when they do double the sales
Senior management at a big retail outlet aren’t stupid, they know sales can be fickle, and store staff don’t have any control over sales on a day to day basis. They will also know this event is happening.
Nobody is getting yelled at over this.
I already minimize the amount of money I spend on superfluous shit and I’m going to need food sooner or later. 🤷
There’s no way this had any affect. I like the sentiment but it won’t work.
Businesses seeing a drop in revenue as a result of a random patchwork organized online effort for a temporary boycott won’t have any effect?
Of course it can. If businesses see it’s possible for people to exercise economic control against them, it makes it just that bit harder for them to expect no resistance going forward. People see the result of their actions and are more likely to engage in other boycotts going forward, and businesses then have to be afraid of future targeted boycotts hitting them harder.
You don’t successfully get a company to back down on anything with the threat of a boycott, if that company has no reason to believe you’re even capable of boycotting them. Doing something like this makes it abundantly clear that it’s possible, and thus increases the likelihood of businesses taking future boycotts seriously.
And if you want to say it won’t work, then I’ll tell you that as a cashier at a smaller local grocery store, today I saw nearly half of all transactions done in cash (usually it’s 1 in every 5-6) to avoid giving credit card companies money, an older woman explicitly mentioning that she was disappointed she had to use her Visa card because she didn’t have cash on her, and on top of that, I also saw a reduction in purchases of non-necessities (about a 20-30% overall volume reduction in total purchases) on top of people swapping out brands I’d usually see purchased like Coca Cola with smaller local drinks instead.
If this is what’s happening at the small local grocery chain, then you might be able to imagine what was happening (or rather, not happening at all due to people staying home) to the large big box store down the road.
Businesses seeing a drop in revenue as a result of a random patchwork organized online effort for a temporary boycott won’t have any effect?
No it won’t. This just means people buy the stuff the another day and is absolutely meaningless to their bottom line
I think it could work but literally no one knew about it today, and so if there is a dip there is no way for anyone to attach it to a movement vs a quiet Friday. I didn’t even figure it out until yesterday on blue sky.
but literally no one knew about it today
Again, see the part of my post where I specified:
And if you want to say it won’t work, then I’ll tell you that as a cashier at a smaller local grocery store, today I saw nearly half of all transactions done in cash (usually it’s 1 in every 5-6) to avoid giving credit card companies money, an older woman explicitly mentioning that she was disappointed she had to use her Visa card because she didn’t have cash on her, and on top of that, I also saw a reduction in purchases of non-necessities (about a 20-30% overall volume reduction in total purchases) on top of people swapping out brands I’d usually see purchased like Coca Cola with smaller local drinks instead.
This was, by my estimates, maybe 30-50% of all the customers in the store. I’m not saying this is the rule, or that it’ll be identical across America. I think my area is probably much more likely to engage in this blackout than others, but I personally think this movement actually caught a lot more people than you might think at first glance.
No Restaurants? What? We’re afraid the authentic turkish food place down the block is colluding with Trump, now? Idiocy.
Yeah dude didnt you hear? If you dont spend money at your local mom & pop shop trump will get impeached
As expected, nothing came of this. Don’t be pathetic. Stop buying from red states and wacko Trump supporters everyday.
Stop buying from red states
No wheat? Even imported Italian pasta is made from American Durum wheat. (Yes Italian pasta companies import US wheat, make pasta from it and then sell it as Italian.)
Sure. Eat a potato from a local farm.
how so. have you been at the meetings? Even the companies won’t bee looking over the data till monday earliest.
Companies look at quarter to quarter metrics. NO company of any size looks at day-to-day metrics.
Retail absolutely looks at daily sales year vs year, referenced to both Julian Dates and Gregorian Dates. They use the data to set staffing levels and to decide when to have sales between holidays.
This is the first I’ve seen and I’m on Lemmy several times a day every day. 11:16pm Feb 28th. Another said they first saw it at 10:30pm.
So we dont buy anything for one day and then go back to ordering on amazon and that will have an effect on… something. Ok got it. Idiots.
It’s supposed to be baby steps towards concrete action.
Kind of like if a smoker goes a whole day without smoking. Yea in the long run it’s not gonna make a difference, but it’s a start towards breaking the addiction.
HEY YOU’RE RIGHT! The people organizing and participating in this believe that this one day of action will solve every abstract problem that exists! I also have simplistic understanding of protest and goals! I also prefer to be snarky at anyone attempting to voice dissent towards the insanity happening in our country!
I’m really sorry to go over the top here, but seriously, there’s no fucking handbook for what we’re going through right now. There’s no questgiver telling us concrete steps to take down objectively evil people. There’s just people trying to figure out how to connect with each other and how to collectively voice dissent. Maybe we should give more credit to people doing imperfect things than to those doing nothing other than pointing out how imperfectly those things are.
there’s no fucking handbook for what we’re going through right now
There are literally thousands of books about how to resist fascism. It has been a mainstream topic for decades now.
For starters:
The history of boycotts shows us that sustained boycotts can be enormously effective. During the civil rights movement, the Montgomery and Tallahassee bus boycotts ended racial segregation on local bus systems. Sustained boycotts were also instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa.
Maybe we should give more credit to people doing imperfect things than to those doing nothing other than pointing out how imperfectly those things are.
Criticism is essential to building stronger movements, and any organizer worth their salt can handle criticism without an emotional outburst.
People doing things imperfectly can be more harmful than just not doing them at all. One-day boycotts damage the reputation of boycotts as a whole, which makes people more reluctant to participate in them because they view them as pointless and ineffective.
The snarky attitude is totally uncalled for, and you’re arguing a point nobody has made.
Nobody has said this will solve everything, but this isn’t a new idea, and I’ve yet to see any evidence it solves anything at all.
Even if we did get a statistically significant number of people to take part, they’ll just buy shit the next few days after instead.
If you want to get people on board, you need to provide some evidence it will actually do something at all
If your protest is convenient it’s a shitty protest. I’m sorry, but this is a shitty protest.
That an corporations don’t care about their daily numbers unless they are trending. Like, people won’t buy stuff today, so they will just go buy the stuff tomorrow. Monthly and quarterly profits took no hit.
Businesses tend to notice trends during economic upswings/downturns. To date, consumer spending has been steadily rising in no small part thanks to upward pressure on wages and inflationary pressure on prices. If we’re entering a recessionary spiral, you won’t need to have a “No Spending Day”. People will reflexively cut their spending when they lose their income.
Something like this might have more teeth if it was paired with protest marches or sit-ins or other actions intended to signal that prices had run away from incomes. But that doesn’t seem to be the message this meme is sending. Nobody is getting encouraged to stand outside a Target and wave a big sign that says “Stop Bird Flu! Make Eggs Cheap Again!” or picketing an Amazon Warehouse over low wages and long hours.
Fully agree. While I wholeheartedly support the intent of this protest, it is entirely performative for the sake of the participants, not for the sake of actually affecting change.
Gotta start somewhere with people. The point is that anyone can do this, and it’s easy to do, but it isn’t really any more difficult to show up to a town hall. And while yes, you and I can (and probably do) take larger, more effective steps, longer boycotts, etc. We need numbers, and that, I think, is the real value of this.
A million times zero is still zero. We gain nothing by entirely performative action. Start somewhere, but make it somewhere meaningful.
Organize something better and shut tf up or just shut tf up. You’re just as bad as them with your piss poor attitude towards people that are at least trying to do something whether it complies with your own personal standards you fail to deliver on yourself, if you weren’t your own biggest failure you would be presenting your initiative piggybacking on this one instead of trying to downplay others.
I suspect these types of actions are actually counter productive, because they take attention away from movements and causes that actually stand a chance of working, while having little to no effect on the business they’re targeting.
There’s no way enough people took this seriously to move the needle on daily sales more than the regular sales fluctuations these stores would see.
No thank you. I’m going to instead continue to rally against treating adults like coddled children and placating them in ways which dis-motivate them from actual collective action by convincing them that they’re already doing collective action. And I’m going to keep criticism bad ideas because good intention alone is not enough. I don’t give a shit about making people feel good or participating in the latest fun leftist trend, I care about meaningful impact.
Feel free to block me if your find your feathers unable to be unruffled.
Why would I block you, you’re your own biggest failure. That you are willing to put it on public display is an amusing commentary to me. Tagged and followed.
Honest question, what is an accessible first step for a population that has basically never performed any collective action that isn’t performative?
Is standing outside a local government building holding a sign to protest federal policy affecting change?
In my view, at least this one day action has a marginal economic impact. Holding a sign on your lunch break so you can post some pictures to Instagram is way more performative.
But it doesn’t have marginal impact. It has zero impact. Whether you spend money on Thursday or Friday, the bottom line is the same. We are starting from the false premise that this has any impact, when the smallest amount of critical thought renders that false immediately.
Yes, get the hell out and stand in front of government offices with signs. Make noise. Be seen. Do anything other than pretending keeping your items in your shopping cart for one additional day has any impact.
That’s completely backwards. It costs elected officials and our corporate overlords LITERALLY nothing to ignore your protest. It’s bad PR at best. Even then, manipulating news coverage, headlines and soundbites is second nature to these people.
How long would an economic strike have to be for it to have an impact you won’t handwave away? There could be prepped food on shelves today that gets thrown out tomorrow. Do it over a weekend and no tickets get sold to a show. Do it for a week and logistics starts getting fucked up.
Standing around and making noise without any other change to your lifestyle or attempting to organize your efforts is completely hollow. Not to mention, infinitely less accessible to people who can’t afford the time or don’t have the physical ability to attend.
Do it for a week and logistics starts getting fucked up.
Yes, change the entire nature and scope of the protest and it might be impactful, I agree with you.
Do it over a weekend and no tickets get sold to a show.
…do you think people are still primarily buying event tickets from in-person box offices same day?
The point is that it has an impact that you’re arbitrarily ignoring. If you scale your sign holding and chanting up to 3 million people in a state capital then it might be impactful as well.
The key here is which of these is a more accessible and reasonable thing to ask people to do as a first action? Is it easier to organize 3 protests of 50,000 people in a month or have 500,000 cut their spending in half for a month?
I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion. Even if skipping corporate stuff for a day is only a mild inconvenience, that is still obviously not convenient. Second, there’s no reason to suspect convenience should strongly impact effectiveness. How much did it inconvenience anyone to boycott South Africa in the 80s?
Maximizing effectiveness for unit of effort is smart. And when a tiny change in share price can make a big difference in CEO compensation, we’d be complete masochists not to use that in our favor. But also even if you’re into maximizing pain, if we wanna talk about permanently going after these corporations then it’s gotta start somewhere. And it’s best to start with getting people to do what’s easy.
I might agree if I believed there was any viable impact here, but even 1mil multiplied by zero is still zero.
This does literally nothing unless you make it a consistent thing.
Ok. Make it a consistent thing then. Starting today.
