Can Consumer Boycotts Actually Be Successful?

Consumers seem open to signing on. A nationally representative Harris poll found that more than 4 in 10 Americans have already shifted their spending over the last few months to align with their moral views. And while the latest retail boycotts may have been animated by opposition to recent moves by the Trump administration, the impulse generally appears to transcend party politics: The same Harris poll found that nearly as many Republicans (41 percent) and independents (40 percent) as Democrats (50 percent) have shifted their spending habits to align with their views. 

“It’s a way for people to say I can’t vote until the off-year election so I’m going to take measures into my own hands along with other like-minded people,” says Lawrence Glickman, a professor of American Studies at Cornell University and author of “Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America” (2009, University of Chicago Press). “A consumer boycott is a collective grassroots action to use economic levers to create some sort of political change,” he says. 

What are the odds that The People’s Union USA boycott will have its intended effect? 

That depends on how you define its goals. Historically, Glickman says, successful consumer boycotts have tended to fall into one of two categories. The first are hypertargeted boycotts focused on addressing specific grievances against companies serving a narrow group or local clientele. As examples, he points to a series of boycotts in 1880s New York City that saw union supporters refusing to patronize a particular bakery or saloon in their area until it hired union labor. 

Schwarz’s national economic blackout is the other kind, Glickman says, where the aim isn’t a specific change but “raising political consciousness.”

Marshall Ganz is inclined to agree. In 1964, he left Harvard University a year before getting his undergrad degree to organize with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, registering Black citizens in Mississippi to vote. The next year, he joined the United Farm Workers, working alongside Cesar Chavez in the effort to unionize California farm workers. 

“There are two ways you can mobilize: through fear and through hope," says Ganz, now a lecturer in Organizing and Civil Society at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Fear doesn’t encourage autonomy, but hope does. Boycotts say the power is with us.”

Here are five examples of consumers using their buying power to make change.

The issue: A formal policy of racial segregation in the public transit system in Montgomery, Ala., forced Black passengers to surrender their seats to white passengers. 

The ask: Courteous treatment by bus operators, seating on a first-come, first-served basis, and hiring Black bus operators on routes predominately taken by black passengers.

The issue: Table grape growers in California fought—sometimes violently—farmworker efforts to organize unions and negotiate collectively for higher wages and basic labor and safety protections.

The ask: Raise the average hourly wage from $1.25 to $1.40 and the piece rate from 10 cents to 25 cents per box of grapes packed, and establish that farmworkers were protected by the National Labor Relations Act and therefore had a right to bargain collectively.

The issue: Driven by a feed grain shortage and increased demand in the U.S. and abroad, meat prices began to soar in 1972.

The ask: Consumers demanded lower prices and called for President Richard Nixon to implement price controls and change farm and export policies. 

The issue: Commercial tuna fishers chasing, netting, and killing dolphins to catch the schools of tuna that tend to follow them. 

The ask: Reform fishing practices to eliminate the use of nets and fishing practices that trap and drown dolphins.

The issue: Opposition to a Bud Light promotional video featuring Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman and social media influencer. 

The ask: “They went woke. Now we should make sure they go broke," then Fox News pundit (and current U.S. Secretary of Defense) Pete Hegseth said of Bud Light manufacturer Anheuser-Busch at the time.

For its part, Consumer Reports has taken a balanced approach to retail boycotts, championing the rights of consumers to vote with their pocketbooks while generally declining to pick sides—and focusing instead on giving consumers the information they need to make their own informed decisions. 

But that balance hasn’t always been easy to maintain, says Norman Silber, a visiting professor of consumer law at Columbia Law School and a former board member (and historian) of Consumer Reports. In the lead-up to World War II, he says, the organization struggled with what to say when its testing found that most German and Japanese cameras were superior to their American counterparts. A decision was made to report the findings in full—but, Silber says, “a box ran next to the ratings urging consumers to sacrifice their desire for the best in order to serve ethical standards.”