The Right Not to Consume: The History and Impact of Consumer Boycotts (Part One)

Consumer boycotts have become a widespread way of challenging food systems and corporations. In this two-part series, I explore the boycott’s history—and examine how the tactic is evolving today.

Hi friends! School is done! Yay! To celebrate, I wanted to share my final paper for a class I took called Food for Thought, a Gender and Women’s Studies course that looked at how food systems impact our society. I can confidently say that anyone reading this newsletter would love the class (and shoutout to Dr. Kate, my professor and an overall amazing thinker and educator). 

Our final paper asked students to hone in on an issue affecting food systems, and I chose to look into boycotts. This was right when students across 25 different campuses called for their universities to stop working with Starbucks due to its alleged union-busting practices, and also around the time workers at Ultimo Coffee in Philadelphia called for a boycott of its stores (which you’ll read about below). This piece is long, so I’m dividing it into two sections: This is Part One, and Part Two will come out tomorrow. 

Thanks for reading!

Photo by Kristina Manchenko on Unsplash

In September 2022, workers from Ultimo Coffee, a Philadelphia-based chain of four coffee shops, announced their intent to unionize. From the get-go, organizer Glaive Perry says, they invited customers to express their support and help pressure the store’s owners, Aaron and Elizabeth Ultimo, to come to the bargaining table. 

“Sip-ins were a big one,” they say. Patrons and labor organizers would come to the stores at a set time and post pictures of themselves supporting the union. Perry says the union also asked customers to use specific hashtags, comment on Ultimo’s social media account, and leave reviews on Google urging the Ultimos to bargain. 

“We were using these digital pressure tactics of asking folks to show their support on the internet to put pressure on management. We were doing that pretty early on,” she says. “But we weren’t really talking about how it related to economic pressure.”

Contract negotiations moved slowly, and the union itself changed shape: The Ultimos voluntarily recognized the union efforts at two of the four stores, while the other two moved to decertify their unions in January 2024. However, on February 21, 2024—nearly 15 months after initially declaring their intent to unionize and still with no contract finalized—the workers took a bigger step: They asked patrons to boycott Ultimo Coffee. 

The boycott made an immediate impact. “Sales were down consistently between 40 and 90%,” says Perry. “I’ve heard anecdotally the mark of a successful boycott is 20% or something like that. We were more effective than was expected.” 

Workers announced they were striking a week later. The union secured its first contract on February 29, 2024, eight days after the boycott began. 

Boycotts—or refusals to engage with a product or brand, commercially or otherwise—can effectively challenge and change food systems. Over the last few years, boycotts have been all over the news, and have been tools utilized by people to show dismay or dissatisfaction with a brand’s decisions and choices, for better or for worse, like ongoing boycotts against Starbucks after it threatened to sue its union, Starbucks Workers United, for posting pro-Palestinian messages of solidarity on X, formerly Twitter, or the 2023 boycott of Bud Light after it partnered with transgender activist and influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which was reported to have lost Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), more than $1 billion in revenue.   

However, not all boycotts move the needle, and even though they can put monetary pressure on a brand, predicting a boycott’s success (or failure) isn’t just about measuring financial impact. What made the boycott at Ultimo successful was likely a mix of careful organizing, clear expectations and goals, and public attention—a pattern repeated throughout history.

BOYCOTTS: A BRIEF HISTORY

Many of today’s most visible boycotts involve food systems, but historian Allyson P. Brantley says that “the original boycotts were not really about food.” 

Brantley is an associate professor of history at the University of La Verne in California, and the author of “Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism.” In its pages, Brantley breaks down the nearly 20-year boycott and strike of the Coors Brewing Company, which started due to its alleged discriminatory practices against Mexican Americans and grew to include boycotters from other marginalized groups. 

While the Coors Boycotts feel emblematic of many modern-day boycotts against food and drink businesses, Brantley clarifies that the practice was actually codified a century earlier, and in a very different context.

In 1880, Captain Charles Boycott was an English-born property manager who collected rent from tenants living in County Mayo, Ireland. Boycott was ostracized by his community for serving eviction notices to tenants during the Land War, a time of political unrest led by the Irish National Land League to secure rights for tenant farmers. 

Days before Boycott served the notices, Charles Stewart Parnell, founder of the Irish National Land League, urged League members to use nonviolent tactics to fight against the land-owning class, as Thomas Hachey, Joseph Hernon, and Lawrence McCaffrey share in their book, “The Irish Experience: A Concise History”:  

“...When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him – you must shun him in the streets of the town – you must shun him in the shop – you must shun him on the fair green and in the market place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him in moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of the country, as if he were the leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he committed.”

Many of Boycott’s employees stopped working for him, and the community stopped serving him. Although forms of boycotting had existed previously (colonists boycotted British goods before the American Revolution, for example), Boycott’s ostracization from his community garnered worldwide attention and gave the concept a tangible definition. “The idea of shunning an offender of the community was an old idea, and it had been used before in Ireland, but never had it been used in an organized way and on a national scale,” writes Gary Minda in the book “Boycott in America: How Imagination and Ideology Shape the Legal Mind.”

Brantley says that while boycotts began as a form of “social ostracism,” they were then “picked up by the labor movement in the United States.” However, they were not always used as tools against owners and business leaders in positions of power. In the late 1800s, labor unions urged people to boycott businesses run by Chinese immigrants, blaming them for low wages. “Originally, they were really used for the purpose of protecting in-group status,” says Brantley. 

Brantley says that boycotts are likely more prevalent within food systems because of “the success and popularity of the United Farm Workers (Delano Grape) Boycott, the Nestle Boycotts, and the Coors Boycotts.”

In particular, the Delano Grape Strike was a critical inflection point that helped organizers see the impact of boycotts on changing food systems. The strike lasted five years, won rights and protections for more than 10,000 farmworkers, and resulted in the creation of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. But boycotting was considered a secondary tactic to “the main strategies of strikes and marches,” writes Matt Garcia in a piece called “A Moveable Feast: The UFW Grape Boycott and Farm Worker Justice” for the International Labor and Working-Class History journal. 

Garcia writes that the victories achieved by the UFW wouldn’t have been possible without labor leader César Chávez’s “embrace of the boycott,” which galvanized actors across the supply chain, from dock workers who unloaded crates of grapes from boats to consumers in grocery stores, to shun non-union grapes. He describes how volunteers adapted their tactics to meet people where they were, engaging with union leaders across sectors involved in the distribution and transport of grapes while also assigning people to go to grocery stores to talk to consumers about the plight of farmworkers. 

“Although most union leaders were dubious of its success,” he writes, “Chávez and his ragtag group of under-resourced, creative, and resilient volunteers proved that consumers could be encouraged to change their purchasing habits in the service of mostly Mexican and Filipino workers living in places far beyond their urban environments.” He concludes that the Delano Grape Strike was “the most successful consumer boycott in United States history.” 

DO BOYCOTTS WORK?

Despite the triumph of the Delano Grape Strike, not all boycotts are as successful—or at least not in obvious ways.

Most boycotts in food systems are designed around withdrawing participation in a commercial transaction: People pledge not to buy from a specific brand or frequent a retail location and spend money. But it’s not necessarily the fear or losing money that compels brands to respond to a boycott. 

“Most boycotts don’t have much of an effect on financial pressure, and that’s because consumers—even when they are extremely motivated to see a change go into effect—tend to be pretty bad about actually changing their behavior,” says Brayden King, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University. King has studied the effectiveness of boycotts and found that they often work (or don’t work) for reasons beyond financial loss. 

“Most of the time, boycotts are effective because they’re really good at stirring up negative publicity,” says King. “Companies want to make that go away.” King looked at 144 boycotts between 1990–2005 and published his findings in an article for the Administrative Science Quarterly journal in 2008. The article, called “A Political Mediation Model of Corporate Response to Social Movement Activism,” found that “the most critical mechanism underlying boycotts’ influence is their ability to damage corporate reputations.”

A boycott challenges the public’s perception of a company, and King found that media attention is a critical component to the success or failure of a boycott. “Most boycotts have a media effect for about 90 days, and then after that, the story gets old, and it dies off,” he says. “But during those 90 days, that’s when companies face the most pressure, and that’s when opinions are being formed about what the company is and what they do.” He says the more media attention a boycott can get, the more pressure a brand or company faces to address boycotters’ demands.  

But what happens when that social pressure dies down? “The received wisdom is that consumer boycotts are difficult to sustain in any product sector successfully, particularly against non-publicly-traded companies,” says Dave Infante, author of Fingers, an independent newsletter about the business of the beer industry. 

“A lot of folks in the craft brewing community made a lot of noise online about boycotting Founders Brewing Company over the details of workplace discrimination that came out in a lawsuit towards the end of the last decade,” Infante says, “but I’ve never seen any evidence that translated into a substantive sales hit, nor that the company took corrective action as a direct response to those boycotts.” There was a 2019 Change.org petition to boycott Founders (with only 26 signatures) after a former employee filed a racial discrimination suit against the company. But after the suit was settled, there has been little visible protest since. 

Infante does note that the Bud Light boycott in reaction to the Dylan Mulvaney ad “frankly surprised me in its efficacy at harming the U.S. sales of Anheuser-Busch InBev, given how disorganized it was.” But he’s unsure if he’d call the boycott a success, and believes that some of the fallout comes from leaders at AB InBev “[choosing] to capitulate.” 

“Right-wingers have called that a success in that it pretty quickly (or even immediately?) brought AB InBev corporate leadership to heel,” he says. After the Dylan Mulvaney ad went viral, which featured the social media star depicted on the beer cans, backlash among conservative groups was swift. Many objected to the partnership with Mulvaney; Kid Rock even made a video of himself shooting cans of the beer in protest. 

As Infante says, the brand quickly capitulated to the cries of boycotters: Two of Bud Light’s executives went “on a leave of absence,” and AB InBev’s head of marketing, Benoit Garbe, stepped down at the end of 2023. “Is that ‘success’ more broadly?,” asks Infante. “I don’t know ... AB InBev posted record-breaking global revenue in 2023 despite being down something like 17% in sales in the U.S. market, so the company has the runway to continue operating as it sees fit.”

Regardless, it does seem social pressure is a critical component in boycotting, and perhaps one of the reasons that boycotts have become more visible in food systems—people usually eat and drink with others. “If you feel like your friends are boycotting this product,” says King, “you may be more likely to boycott as well.”

King also notes that visibility is critical: During the Delano Grape Strike, volunteers went to grocery stores to talk to consumers; likewise, during the Ultimo boycott, workers stood outside cafe locations and explained to patrons why they were boycotting. “We saw a difference when it was the staff at these shops who were outside being like, ‘I work here, and I’m here off the clock in my free time explaining to you what’s happening and why we’re doing this,’” says Perry. 

Visibility not only serves as an accountability measure but can also help attract new supporters to a cause. “People who maybe don’t even intend to boycott, maybe they don’t even know anything about the strike or the labor disagreement, may not go to that coffee shop just because they don’t want to have to cross a picket line,” says King.

And even if a boycott doesn’t work now, boycotts can signal cultural shifts that companies are keen to get ahead of. “If you look at a boycott as an independent instance, its ability to be successful totally depends on the amount of media attention that it’s able to generate. But if you put it in the context of the larger changes happening in an industry or society at that time, [success] is also a function of the extent to which other companies are simultaneously changing or being pressured to change,” says King. 

King says companies look at how other analogous businesses have fielded pressure from activists, and take note of how consumers have responded to boycotts within their sector. He points to boycotts taken against Nike during the 1990s in response to revelations of its unethical labor practices, and how that inspired other sportswear brands to change their supply chains. “They don’t want to go through a scandal because of a boycott to change,” he says. “They’ll change to avoid that reputational threat.”

Tomorrow: Why are boycotts happening now? And what makes them successful? See you then!