How Do Boycotts Work?

American voters got more than they bargained for when they elected Donald Trump for another go-round in the Oval Office. Trump deputized his sieg-heiling benefactor, Elon Musk, to become his “governing partner” without anyone’s consent. But Musk got his money’s worth after donating $200 million to the president’s campaign—Trump welcomed the Tesla CEO to lead the made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which purportedly aims to cut down government spending and increase governmental effectiveness. So far, DOGE  has slashed thousands of public jobs—including nearly abolishing departments that were investigating Musk’s companies, like SpaceX—disappearing decades of crucial data, shutting down USAID, cancelling thousands of government contracts and programs, and destroying Social Security. Musk, who has no governmental experience, has been given full access to our data, our jobs, our money, with no oversight, rendering us all vulnerable. 

The public has taken action and hit the ketamine-addled billionaire—who believes empathy has been “weaponized—where it hurts most: his money. The lion’s share of Musk’s wealth comes from Tesla, once a company embraced by both sides of the aisle for making environmentally friendly electric cars. The Tesla Takedown movement has pushed for a total boycott of the EVs, with weekly protests at showrooms, calling on people to dump their Tesla stocks and cars to tank the company in a collective attempt to stop Musk’s government takeover. It has been so effective that the government has tried to push back, with Attorney General Pam Bondi threatening to charge anyone who dares to vandalize a Tesla car or showroom with “domestic terrorism.” 

Tesla isn’t the only corporation being boycotted by angry Americans and their allies around the world. As Trump and Musk plunge the country deeper into fascism, dismantling federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, which the Trump administration describes as “radical and wasteful,” a number of corporations, like McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, Meta and Target, are rolling back their DEI efforts, too. According to a Bloomberg analysis, roughly 20 percent of companies in the S&P 100 have abandoned their DEI goals since Trump returned to office, including a number who had pledged to devote resources to DEI programs in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. This has enraged consumers—and, since the beginning of the year, they’ve enacted boycotts against these companies, as well. 

Do boycotts really work though? As consumers, withholding our money can be our most effective way to make an impact, even as corporations and billionaires like Musk work hard to convince us otherwise. The mass boycott of Tesla has been one of the most impactful actions, if not the most, since Trump’s return to office. In the past three months, Tesla’s profits have dropped 71 percent, prompting Musk to lessen his time on DOGE matters to “a day or two per week.” 

Other boycotts are ongoing, as consumers have realized revenue and brand reputation can be targeted with strategic direct action. This is true, for example, for Target, an ostensibly liberal company which announced its abandonment of DEI efforts just four days after Trump’s executive order dismantling DEI across the federal government. 

According to Forbes, Target’s fourth quarter net sales declined 3% after the store’s 180 on DEI shocked the progressive consumers that Target has been cultivating and profiting from for years. Though Target’s leadership started destroying its own brand reputation by following Trump’s political direction, the #TargetFast, a 40-day boycott of the retailer led by Black faith leaders, is further dismantling any facade of progressiveness, inclusion, and anti-racism corporate policy left in the corporation.

“This is a fast for accountability,” the TargetFast.org website reads. “A fast for justice. A fast for a future where corporations do not bow to pressure at the expense of marginalized communities. As we journey through these 40 days, let us pray, reflect, and act—knowing that our collective sacrifice can bring about transformation.”

Similarly, the Tesla boycott has focused on weakening the brand, both financially and culturally, through protests in Tesla showrooms in the U.S. and abroad. The toll it has taken is not just national: In Australia, Tesla sales are down by 72%, in Germany, by 76%. Even if the #BoycottTesla movement doesn’t directly stop Musk from cozying up to fascism for his own personal gain, the brand reputation of the company has been tarnished indelibly. Tesla owners are rushing to add bumper stickers to their cars, claiming they bought their Tesla models before Musk became a fascist. 

And it’s making Trump squirm, claiming consumer action against Tesla is “illegal” as he turned the White House lawn into a car showroom out of desperation. But where do these recent consumer boycotts fit into consumer-action history? And what can we learn from previous boycotts to bolster movements going forward?

 

A Brief History of Boycotts and Civil Rights 

The practice of boycotting can be traced back to the Quakers’ abstention from buying sugar in 1750 in a protest against slavery. While adherence to the sugar boycott wasn’t uniform across the Quaker population—many of them enslaved people—this is the first recorded instance of matching your core beliefs with your buying habit. This particular boycott might not have ended slavery, but it did raise awareness of working conditions in sugar production, as well as a way for individual consumers to express their discontent with a company’s egregious practices.

Civil rights movements have historically used boycotts to help achieve their goals, to signal to the wider population that  human rights abuses are being committed  in specific parts of society. The Montgomery bus boycott, the most successful and famous in civil-rights history, lasted 382 days after civil-rights leader Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus on December 1, 1955. The boycott led to Alabama desegregating the public buses, when the Supreme Court deemed segregated bus seating unconstitutional.

According to Garritt Van Dyk, a historian at the University of Waikato in New Zealand who researches the history and psychology of economic boycotts, the success of protesting by withholding our money depends on many variables. “Boycotts can work, but it can take time and it really depends upon the product, and the brand alternatives,” Van Dyk says. “It also depends on people’s willingness to say: I’m willing to forgo that, I’m willing to actually endure some cost on my part by not having that, even though it might be more inconvenient or might involve some additional expense, I’m going to do that because this is important to me.”

With the Montgomery bus boycott, it took a whole community’s organization, and tremendous personal sacrifices, to make a significant impact. Black people had to plan their daily lives around the boycott, walking miles to get to their destination or organizing carpools. In Clarksdale, Mississippi, the 1961 boycott of stores that discriminated against Black customers and employees required that people buy their groceries and essentials in towns 20 minutes away from their homes. The commitment to not shop at discriminatory stores, like the bus boycott in Montgomery, took long-term planning, as well as a massive collective effort to maintain and the building of support networks that aid the withholding of business. 

In recent years, however, boycotting has become increasingly difficult because of the proliferation of conglomerates, which own so many smaller brands. Today, consumers might choose to boycott a specific brand by switching to an alternative without knowing that the alternative is owned by the same conglomerate as the brand they’re trying to avoid. Because of this, Van Dyk advises that this kind of protesting has to be based on robust research on the offending brands and who owns them. Additionally, there is the inescapable fact that most, if not all, corporations we buy products from are acting unethically in some way. Some conscious consumers might ask themselves whether they are doing more harm switching from Target to Amazon, for example, a company that has been taken to court for unlawful labor practices numerous times. 

“Sometimes, it could be [about] choosing between the lesser of two evils,” Van Dyk said.

“For example it might be you’d rather shop at Costco than Target because it’s still in a similar shopping center, it’s only an extra five minutes out of your way.” Notably, Costco has defended their DEI policy as other corporations dismantled theirs.

But is the fact that all corporations are evil a reason not to adhere to any boycotts? The idea that there’s no ethical consumption in capitalism has become a sort of excuse for not trying at all—if everything we buy is evil, then what’s the point of going out of my way to make a purchase that is, essentially, a drop in a bucket of consumerism? Van Dyk says that while this may be true, the most successful boycotts are narrowly targeted (pun not intended) and don’t necessarily deliver the demands, but raise awareness about the issue and erode brand reputation.

“Boycotts work best when there’s a single product or a single brand that can be targeted,” Van Dyk said. “The more focused it is, the easier it is and that way you get more results in a shorter time frame. Historically, when business analysts and historians look at boycotts, they think about the impact in terms of profit. But I think about it also culturally, and part of it is the damage to brand reputation and whether brand equity goes down. Even if it doesn’t really show up on your bottom line, part of what a boycott does is it raises awareness, and it generates news and it becomes something that gets highlighted in the news cycle and people then pay attention to it.”

While Musk is still in the White House, the Tesla boycott has certainly succeeded in eroding brand reputation and profit revenue in a very short period of time. And it doesn’t seem like there’s truly a way to recuperate Tesla’s previous image as a good-for-the-environment car because Tesla’s brand reputation is closely linked to Musk’s image as a supposed genius inventor, a widely held belief that has been demystified by Musk’s fascist actions as a type of proxy-president. According to David Zipper at Slate, Tesla was already particularly vulnerable to this boycott because the company’s profit margins had been shrinking already at the end of 2024 due to the flop in sales of the infamous Cybertruck and the limited updates provided to potential customers. If anybody ever thought Musk was a genius businessman, the boycott has demonstrably shown otherwise—after all, it was Musk who decided to destroy his own reputation, and with it, the reputation of his most profitable company. That’s the way the cookie crumbles in capitalism. Deal with it.

 

Taking Back Consumer Autonomy

We live in the era of ultra-convenience, which makes adhering to a boycott of such a handy retailer as Target—where you can get anything, from electronics to groceries—a difficult, sometimes impossible task, depending on where you live and what you are able to do with your income. Boycotting can be difficult for people who are disabled, people who live in food deserts, people who rely on the low prices Target offers to survive because they don’t earn enough money to shop elsewhere. The list of reasons why someone might not be able to adhere to a boycott is pretty much endless, but the effort we make when we autonomously decide to buy from somewhere else can also be a motivating factor to keep changing the world around us. 

The Target fast is a great example of how boycotting can be an active and community-focused way of protesting the dismantling of DEI programs across corporate America. On the TargetFast.org website, Rev. Bryant encourages boycott participants to engage with the fast profoundly and to reflect on the issue at hand. “Fasting is not just about what we abstain from. It is about what we embrace. By redirecting our resources toward businesses that uphold justice, we embody our commitment to God’s vision of equity and love in action,” the TargetFast.org website reads. 

Choosing to boycott something for a larger cause asks us to question our daily lives and the conveniences we depend on every day. It’s not easy—or sometimes, even possible—to change your routine but it can feel empowering to take action, as little as it may be, to change a socially unjust reality. “The reverend said that when you’re fasting, you’re not just giving something up, you’re also embracing something,” Van Dyk said, emphasizing that this is a part of the psychology of boycotts. “That’s important to think about because it means that I’m not just giving something up—I’m giving it up for a reason, and in giving it up for a reason, I’m actually embracing something.” In boycotting, participants are embracing a vision of diversity, equity and inclusion, and spending their dollars accordingly. 

Yes, boycotting Target—or anything you depend on in your daily life—might be hard, but it also means we are taking back the autonomy capitalism is intent on taking away from us. Boycotting can mean you’re burdened with the labor of finding alternatives, but it also means you are making a real choice about something you will not put up with. It may change your perspective on how corporations work and how little choice we have in the way we exist in this world. 

“Boycotting is not perfect by any means, but I think that the more people familiarize themselves with the way corporations actually work in the real world,” Van Dyk said. “It does also open their eyes to corporate culture and the way big business works, and how it can be very almost incestuous, the way that these companies become conglomerates. It’s not legally a cartel, or collusive but it’s hard to really find your way to get to someplace else that isn’t on that list.”

How Do I Do It?

If you do decide to boycott Target, Tesla, Amazon, or any other brand, it’s important that you research viable alternatives to what you are giving up. Whether you are giving up on a specific product you always get at Target, or you’re foregoing doing your groceries, use the internet to your advantage and find other places to shop. Ask yourself what you are willing to change about the way to shop to change the unjust reality of growing fascism in the US. Can you drive 15 minutes out of your way to shop at another grocery store? Can you plan your weekly grocery shop 48 hours in advance so you can order food online? 

Turning to your community can also be essential for boycotting. Are there other people in your area attempting to boycott the same retailers as you? Look for them, online or in real life, and have a conversation about the alternatives they are buying instead of the offending brand(s). Can you organize a carpool to the nearest alternative store? Could you do a joint shop with a neighbor and share the cost of gas money? Ask people who are trying to adhere to the boycott what they need help with and tell people what you’re struggling with—boycotts are usually organized for a collective goal, so it makes sense that those goals are achieved collectively. 

Sometimes, you might have to switch to another corporate retailer like Costco or even Amazon. It’s not ideal, but remember that boycotts work best when they are focused on a brand losing business during a particular period of time. While all these corporate retailers are deeply unethical, focusing on not buying from a specific brand to express discontent is the point here.

Ideally you could find smaller businesses for alternatives. Do some research in your local community—what small businesses don’t get enough customers and how could that fit into your goal of boycotting a brand that doesn’t match your values? How can your spending be redirected to marginalized communities rather than corporations? It might not be easy to find alternatives in your area, but once you find them, you can become a loyal customer and direct your community to that business.