Just some additional advertising for todays boycott.
Shit, I wasn’t on here. Tell you what, make another Devil’s Panties Blackout in six months. We encourage people to stock up on canned foods that can be eaten later, and bathroom items, soaps, whatever. Friend groups are established for the blackout just in case somebody loses something. It might last more than a week, maybe even a month. We should post this in streamers’ chats to encourage people to spread the word; this will be on fun streams where it will not be intrusive. Make sure to target people who can remember to do things, or use it as an opportunity to help people to remember schedules. People will stay with each other to get along.
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
Without any replacements, this boycott isn’t going to last. We should be promoting alternatives with the blackout too. Costco isn’t available everywhere.
It’s good people are doing something, but I can’t help but feel it would be way more effective if it was a sustained boycott of targeted businesses. Not buying anything for a year is impossible, but not buying anything from one particular store for a year is possible.
Could you imagine the dread corporate would feel if they saw Banana Republic get boycotted for 2025 and looked at the boycott schedule and their name was listed under 2026?
Yup. One day of no shopping means the big corps just weather a day of lower purchases and the next day people will be buying the stuff they skipped out on friday. It’s hardly a noticeable blip to them.
No Restaurants? What? We’re afraid the authentic turkish food place down the block is colluding with Trump, now? Idiocy.
I found out about this yesterday. I don’t know what happened to the messaging, but lucky i saw it in time on blue sky.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Forgot about this, but luckily I never really buy shit other than food.
What everyone need to do is target all their stock and funds of a particular company…. And sell that shit. Short it. Buy their competitor’s stock.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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 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.
if they’re all back the next.
Don’t worry, nobody is going to buy anything on February 29 either.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
I already minimize the amount of money I spend on superfluous shit and I’m going to need food sooner or later. 🤷
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.
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.
How about pooling money together and starting a competing co-op?
I agree! So let’s all stop spending today to get people on board and save a few bucks, then use that momentum to pool that money the next day.
People seem to dislike this protest because inaction is seen as ineffective and opposed to active protest. Its “too easy”, which puts a bad taste in their mouth.
But on the other hand:
- its dead easy
- has no barrier to entry
- has no regressive downside on those unable to spend
- even partial participation can add up
- is simple to communicate and organize
- doing it for one day makes it easy to see how you could do it for longer. The hardest part of any diet is when you just start out
If anything, I see putting the economic brakes on as allowing for more leverage and room to organize. If work is slow maybe you have more time to attend that protest; maybe you’re not in a rush to get back to the shop if it’s closed early.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I’m already broke. I’m boycotting everyone except my landlord, Aldis, the liquor store, and my weed/psychedelic bro
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!
Would it be wrong to view this as economic accelerationism? Even if businesses can adjust to consumption cycles, not all consumption needs on one day translate to the next.
Skipping lunch at the diner might mean you increase demand for pb&j sandwiches, but you’re putting the waitress and cook out of a job. Maybe that’s just freeing up their labor to be put to more… productive endeavors.
Honest question, what’s your stance on hunger strikes or other protests outside the workplace? I’m of the opinion that, in 2025, any disruption is good disruption.
An example of spending as power being a fallacy is high-quality products that everyone who buys them loves them. Then, to boost profits the company uses a lesser quality metal (like pocket knives, guns, etc.). It is short-sighted, but it may increase profits. If buying exerted power, companies wouldn’t trade out materials that people liked.
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.
Okay, what helps? Standing outside Starbucks, Walmart, amazon warehouses, anywhere non-union, and spend your time trying to convince their workers to join a union. There’s a reason that, when the Nazis took over, “First they came for the Trade Unionists”. Don’t say nothing. Let’s Make More Trade Unionists
We need maps of what helps, and how much.
political ground campaigning, probably.
The engine of the modern economy is mass consumption just as much as labor, especially since a lot of labor is done overseas these days. Everyone not buying stuff from Amazon is just as much an existential threat to it as the entire work force striking. Either way you deny them there profits and force them to pay there fixed capital costs with no revenue.
You could argue it’s less feasible to organize the mass of consumers then it is to organize a workplace, but the power is still there either way.
Bottom 60% of earners in the US represent less than 25% of total consumption. The power is in labor and labor only, there’s a reason why we have plenty of historical examples of successful labor movements, not so much of consumer movements.
Im guessing many folks or at least more than the usual percent on the fediverse do this to some degree. I have seen other comments about it and have done them myself. Its really not to much work to me but its a continuing thing. Regularly thinking about what else you can cut out or if you think you can finally cut out a particular thing. So im not where I would want to be and im past low hanging fruit and it will be slow going forward of where I am not but I will continue.
Not always possible. In rural areas, Walmart in particular is a mom and pop shop killer. Restaurants maybe, groceries and the like, this is not that universally possible.
