Just some additional advertising for todays boycott.
Lots of naysayers trying to convince everyone not to participate, or to fragment efforts with competing ideas.
So much of our consumer culture is buying shit we don’t need like impulse buys and stupid movies and fast food. That’s profitable stuff, and skipping that for one day doesn’t mean you’ll just buy it the next day.
One day won’t do much. I took it as a sign it was time to delete the Amazon and Walmart app from all my devices and move onto other services.
We need PERMANENT boycotts. DON’T GO BACK!! Abandoned them and leave them to rot.
Follow what I see every Canadian is doing in the grocery store. Look up the brand and if it’s American put it back and add to the permanent no buy list.
As an American I use Goods Unite Us to look up political contributions before buying
I second this app, I’m a big fan of the campaign finance reform score. If you want an easy way to fight the citizens united ruling, this is it.
Also want to give a shout out to https://www.opensecrets.org/. their site isn’t as easy to use as goods, but the have a lot more data and if you can’t find info about a company or politician on goods you can usually still find it on open secrets.
I mean im american but im pretty much like this. A bit limited with my wife but we don’t buy subscriptions, don’t have smartphones, and are getting our stuff second hand a lot now. Granted this has been a thing with us thats just been growing for like the last decade. Essentially we have just gotten more and more serious about and emphasizing more the first two parts of reduce, reuse, recycle.
I’m sure this one day boycott will be just as effective as the others were.
If you want results you need to put in time and have a target. Conservatives didn’t boycott beer, they boycotted Bud Light. They didn’t do it for a day, they did it until Bud Light gave up. Say what you will about the “why” of it, but it was effective.
I posted another comment but they are effective if strong enough. If their metrics crash today it will worry them. Later if it can be followed up by two days, three, a week. Its a message. There are some more targeted ones on the calendar to. Might have actually been more effective for the artist to do a remember one yesterday but then again its nice to do a solidarity one today. We shall see how much people care to send a message or not.
You’re assuming anybody outside of Lemmy even knows about this. I haven’t seen any indication of that.
I have, I received texts from friends and family about this protest that don’t even know what the fediverse is.
European here. So how did this go yesterday? News coverage?
No impact. Every where I went was busy as fuck all day yesterday.
… Did you go just to check it out?
No I was just working then running errands then had dinner reservations for my sister’s birthday before this whole thing was given a date.
Well that all checks out… This time 😝
The AP ran an article on it
Didn’t know it happened other than lemmy
Buy Nothing Day has existed since the 1990s — I believe that Kalle Lassen popularized it in his ADBUSTERS monthly.
Coverage in AP and NPR is amazing progress.
When you find out most of the people live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford to buy in bulk, or don’t even have a place to store it because they live in an apartment, is when you realize that only a certain privileged subset of them is able to participate in this type of passive protests…
I mean, I’ve been very poor. Not buying is the easy part when you’re poor - buying stuff is the hard part, so not sure what your point is on this one.
If you have money you can stockpile for the duration of an embargo. If you don’t you have to cave. That is the point.
It was 1 day tho?..
And bulk foods are significantly cheaper than non-bulk. So ate preserved foods / long lasting over fresh. I’d get bulk beans, canned spinach, canned mandarins, spam, bulk noodles, sack of potatoes, etc, so the argument doesn’t make sense there either. If I did get something fresh, usually it was fresh meat on sale that I could immediately cook or freeze if I could afford to buy extra for later.
Bulk is cheaper per unit. But if you can’t buy the unit… Please slow down and realize a day might be a bridge too far.
I literally sometimes was going a day without food, or on 400 calories or less. I’d lay with a pillow or a hard object under my stomach to calm the hunger pain. I’d drink a lot of water at once to feel full. I’d walk miles on my free days (when I had the energy) to the local forest to forage (mostly got nopales to make with eggs).
Bulk is cheaper overall. If you can’t buy the bulk unit, you can’t buy, well, anything, because paychecks aren’t daily (other than when working for tips, but you can save for specific bulk items then, and being a waiter can have food perks), and bulk items will last you longer than a day. Rice and beans last longer than a day, and a large bag of both of extremely cheap and can last you 5 days easily if you eat once a day.
You’re literally telling someone who was in extreme poverty how to survive extreme poverty.
And yet your failing to recognize that not being able to buy cheap bulk means buying more expensive per unit that is less up front?
So I mean my wife and I shop pretty much daily for the quality of life of fresh ingredients. she also has a hard time with carbs so what we buy is more for me.
I know, I’m just saying when poor you specifically don’t shop daily, because that also means more trips to the store, which is more trips to the store, which is more time and fuel. It’s easier to weather a boycott if poor than privileged as the original content I replied to mentioned.
This in the USA though.
I’m Finland, near daily trips can be cheaper, if shopping for sales, because you can usually walk to a market. But frozen vegetables are still usually cheapest for vegetable options. Canned items here are expensive. Bulk is still cheaper here too.
Buying in bulk was the point. When you can stockpile on idk, meat, toilet paper, water… Etc. For a whole month.
Who was saying the blackout was for a month???
And if in extreme poverty, you don’t eat much meat, it’s mostly eggs (years ago when they were cheap). Fresh meat was always an “it’s on sale because it’s expiring today” event that you’d buy as much as you can and then piece out to freeze for later while eating a bit that same day. Most of the time it was cheap canned meats you’d have coupons for ideally of you wanted meat, and you wouldn’t eat the whole can at once.
Water??? Really?
I mean, maybe you had a good intention, but you clearly have no idea what poverty is like. When you’re that poor you don’t buy water, you get what’s on tap - even if it smells strongly of bleach.
I’m not gonna read all that homie, when you clearly are out of your mind.
How the fuck did you conclude that when not reading something that’s nearly the same length as your initial comment?
I take that back, you don’t have good intentions, don’t care about the poor clearly, and are just trying to sabotage people’s organizing efforts while discussing in complete bad faith.
Lmao keyboard warrior.
Did you get triggered or offended when you read you live paycheck to paycheck?
Before anyone decides to reply to this person’s comment or reads it and thinks they’re being legitimate, read their replies to me.
They’re arguing in bad faith to undermine any protests and don’t care at all about whether someone is poor or not.
deleted by creator
They’re arguing in bad faith
Who the fuck is arguing? You must be a retard who gets triggered and fights everyone. Did you just come from reddit? Lmao
Eh. By what I’ve read this was more ‘practice’ for a week long blackout. People don’t seem to understand though that those goods are needed period and all it will do is create a weird spike in supply/demand before and after the week/day. General focused boycotting on non-essentials is impactful, but one day? You’re just going to go out and buy the day before or after. That doesn’t even create a blip for suppliers.
I wonder what percentage of the population could do a week long blackout.
Less than 10 % if shops introduce discounts during the week
Do et, Yankies. STICK IT TO THE MAN
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.
There’s an ever growing chance shit like this just functions as pressure release psyops because it makes people feel accomplished while doing fuck all as everyone buys more the day before or the day after.
What people -don’t want to- understand is that for it to hurt the corporations, it’s got to hurt all of us. Either we give up things entirely like streaming and luxury goods or we do a general strike that costs millions of people their jobs or prompts a fascist crackdown.
The only good ways out of this spot were decades ago. Every path forward is miles of broken glass because of how propagandized a majority of this country is. Everyone wants to blame Trump or Republicans, but Democrats have spent at least 30 years with Clinton’s 3rd way dems (gay tolerant Reaganites) pushing the Overton window right.
http://politicalcompass.org/uselection2016
Hilary’s policy was assessed as farther right than Trump’s. Obama basically handed the Heritage Foundation everything they wanted.
These bullshit one day strikes aren’t going to save us and neither are the Democrats simply because if they were interested in preserving democracy, they wouldn’t have been slow walking us right for decades.
MIT lecture from 2014 about oligarchy controlling everything already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzS068SL-rQ
This eerily reminds me to the “minute of hate”
Yeah, there’s a body of research about social media both used to foster animosity as well as complacency.
I was gonna say. I go out and buy something about once a week… I realize I’m not the norm but for a single day to matter to most people blows my mind.
It doesn’t count as a boycott. It was a protest. A boycott is something else.
why not boycott all major corporations every day? it does require a bit of work, but the more money you spend locally, the better your local communities will be
That’s just not how our economy works. “Local” business is not making toilet paper from trees they cut down in their backyard.
I’m probably getting downvoted for this but I hate hate hate this “consumption is power” bull shit boycotts. Consumption is NOT power. LABOR is power. If you work at these large companies you have a million times more power and influence by organizing.
Boycott today if it makes you feel good. But it’s so incredibly missing of the point that I have to assume it is purposely missing the point of collective power.
Your power is in your ability to withhold labor. Not withholding consumption for one day that you’ll just buy the next day. Hell, if these planned organized single day boycotts, if they actually had an impact, would be a way to maximize profits to reduce labor requirements for those days. It’s so silly.
Organize your workplace. That is where your power is!
100%, but why not both? amazon only got that big because we keep buying from it (that and all the government contracts). buying from local stores that also buy from local stores is the best from a purchasing aspect. and as far as data, that’s massively more important and valuable to them than your $
We need maps of what helps, and how much.
No more saying stuff doesn’t work and misses the point. Only pointing to where it is on the map. Better for organizing.
Sorry. If you’re actually asking but I thought I was pretty clear. Labor organizing is where power is. This starts at YOUR workplace. There are plenty of resources and “maps” to get you started but that is often very unique to your location and place of work. There is not a single meme image that I can post. This takes work. The start of that work is looking for labor organizing movements in your area and place of work. If there are no existing unions or labor movements you can contact the AFL-CIO or other organizations in your field. They can help you learn more about your resources.
This takes work. If I could post a meme image like the OP I would. But it doesn’t work that way. You need to be ready to do work. Talking to your coworkers, agitating, etc.
Chris Smalls is your inspiration but we need 1000 more Chris Smalls throughout the country. Not one day of a consumer boycott.
This is not about being a downer towards any movement. It’s about understanding that class war is always filled with distractions like these single day consumer boycotts that do absolutely nothing. People that are downers about them are trying to direct people towards what should actually be done. It’s not one massive movement out of the blue. It takes a lot of local and small work to even get to having any leverage at that scale.
Once we actually have a massive labor organizing movement in this country THEN the leaders of major unions can call for and organize something like a general strike. But that doesn’t happen on its own because someone posted a “general strike” meme on reddit. It’s takes a lot of work, organizing, and very specific demands, and strike funds.
But this all starts with you and the organization of labor in your workplace.
We are fighting capital. It doesn’t just end up with a bunch of peaceful protests and the capitalist class rolling over and saying “ok you can all have healthcare”. They have all the power of the police, state violence, and media agitating. It’s why you need massive organization, solidarity, and funding for your cause. And most of all very specific and united demands. Otherwise these movements quickly die when people can’t pay their rent or buy food.
So… anything is a comic strip nowadays it seems.
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.
boycotts dont work but ill support any attempt at it, sure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, how’d everyone do? I had to order some magic cards so I stayed up until midnight to do it lol. I also need to replace a pvc pipe under my kitchen sink so that waited until today and I’ve been getting water from the bathroom…
It was easy for us as we have cut out a lot of consumerism to begin with so we are not the best household for it. Would be interesting to hear if folks who are the type getting deliveries every day stopped for yesterday.
I heard buying local is fine so we got some sandwiches from a local restaurant, but other than that, we just stayed in. So success on our parts I think!
I didn’t know about it. Tried to pull into Kroger after work and couldn’t find a parking spot. I’m going to say it is likely even the stores didn’t know about it. Ended up saying forget it, skipped dinner and picked up something from the mom and pop liquor store instead. That about sums up America for me right now
I “broke” about 8pm ET to donate to Ukraine. I know we were boycotting Visa/Mastercard too, but after yesterday’s shitshow I felt like solidarity was worth more than my boycott.
Otherwise, it was fine. I’ve already been heavily limiting my spending since the inauguration anyway, after admittedly overspending at the end of the Biden term to prep for impending tariffs.
No Restaurants? What? We’re afraid the authentic turkish food place down the block is colluding with Trump, now? Idiocy.
So what I dont understand is, even if one were to do a week long blackout of buying anything, we would still need to get milk and eggs and crap. So is the idea to switch from amazon to other stores or not spend altogether? Because not spending altogether is a pretty stupid and unrealistic goal.
My main complaint is that anything not bought on the day of the blackout will just be bought the following day.
Better protest is to act as if there is a recession. Buy only what you need, and if possible seek an alternative from a smaller manufacturer. As aways don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
You’re describing how a lot of people have been living for a couple of years now.
And we need those who are not to join in a similar behavior to help the protest
What is the protest though? What are the demands and how will we know when they are achieved?
The best answer I can get in these threads is to “send a message” of “general discontent”, but protests just don’t really work that way.
Decide what you want and figure out what to boycott in order to harm the people that are able to grant it.
Maybe make a trivial amount of effort to find those details yourself.
It’s a response to the active class warfare happening, including the anti-DEI efforts.
Targeted boycotts aren’t enough anymore. Too many major corporations, often without adequate competition, are working against us.
Sorry, the article you linked doesn’t list any demands.
The closest it comes is this:
an act of “economic resistance” to protest what the group’s founder sees as the malign influence of billionaires, big corporations and both major political parties on the lives of working Americans.
This demonstrates my point really. There’s a general sense of dissatisfaction with billionaires and with capitalism, but there are no demands. If you’re not demanding anything, how will you know when you have achieved your goal?
This is really part of it, but it’s not included explicitly in that article like it should be.
Other activists, faith-based leaders and consumers already are organizing boycotts to protest companies that have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and to oppose President Donald Trump’s moves to abolish all federal DEI programs and policies.
Sorry, what I’m trying to explain is that protests require specific demands.
If a protest like this got any traction, companies could just say “ok we’re listening, we will think about reinstating some DEI things”.
Nope
Nope to what?
It’s not a better protest to buy only what you need. That is advice how to live life. In America you have forgot how to protest or why people do so. It’s a message.
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
ive seen this promoted all over the place for weeks
Huh, guess I need to tweak my Lemmy feed then
FYI unfiltered “All” had plenty of it.
Do you know about the nationwide general strike on March 14th?
Who’s organizing it? Is the UAW involved? Last time I heard, plans for the next general strike including nationwide unions were set for 2028
As someone with a french background, I’m laughing my ass off.
Until I see the UAW, USW, AEU, ASFCME, or CAW get involved it’s not a general strike. Keep up the effort, but to anyone actually organizing these things you need to get large labor unions on your side. Otherwise no one will notice.
