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Voting with your wallet is a lie, like recycling plastic
You can't do collective action individually. You can make the house hurt a little bit, but you'll never force them to change through what you buy. The house always wins, unless you get together to change the rules
I disagree with this. You can already see a recent example of Canadian consumers avoiding US imports, creating pressure on US companies, and the US government reacting by making moves to curtail the original tarrifs proposal.
Obviously the Canadian boycott was only one component but I believe it did have a meaningful impact.
Kind of agree with you re:plastics. Last time I read about it they could only be recycled once into inferior quality plastic. Ironically in this case I'd suggest voting with your wallet is a solution to the plastic problem since businesses will react to more consumers switching to responsibly packaged products like paper bags for fruit + veg from a local grocers. One of the large supermarket chains in the UK, Waitrose, switched to paper bags due to public pressure in the past few years.
The Canadian boycotts are not "voting with your wallet", they're collective action.
Canadians, together, decided to boycott American goods. Their leaders cancelled deals. Their local stores and suppliers decided they'd rather source from anywhere else. The Canadian government started working on trade deals with everyone else
The nation of Canada as a whole is boycotting American goods. They're not doing this individually, they have an organized response
Encouraging people to vote with their wallet creates collective action. How do you think these things start? You telling people not to bother is exactly how you prevent it.
No, that's backwards. You don't reduce plastic by recycling, you don't change corporate behavior by not buying their stuff
If a company loses a customer, that's nothing. If a company has less sales, that's a marketing problem. They aren't going to operate more morally now, because it's a business problem and a PR problem
Boycotts are very different. You get a block of people together, you tell them "we're all boycotting you because X", and then they see it in their numbers. You do it loudly. The investors get nervous, you've very publicly connected the cause and effect, other businesses might join in to take advantage, etc
You have to organize first, it's great to shop ethically if you can, but you're just acting as the market as a whole... Are they going to start farming more sustainably, or are they going to try to convince consumers they are? One of these things is much easier and cheaper
If you're organized, you can come back with "hey everyone, they're bullshitting us, keep up the boycott"
The dangerous part of this is that without organization, people feel like they're fixing the problem when they're not. It gives an illusion of control that isn't there
Voting with your wallet can be a boycott. Seems like you’re really mincing words here and creating a false equivalent to recycling plastic that no one else is using as a comparison.
It's not a false equivalence, it's the same exact thing
Its a lie. The lie is "you can do collective action individually". You can't... That's not how any of this works
Boycotts are real. Voting with your wallet is just shopping.
There's no message to it, no power - just a slice of consumers to market to differently or a need to pivot
You can vote with your wallet by not shopping.
No, you can't. You can reduce your consumption, and that's great
But you have to eat. You have to wear clothes. You likely have to drive and to pay rent or buy appliances. You have to buy entertainment, because honestly most everything is monitised to crazy levels.
You can't opt out. You can be a different kind of shopper. You can be an anomolus data point. But even if you live in a self built lean to and live as a freegan vegan, you've changed nothing if you've done it alone