Keep the Pressure On: Early Boycott Impacts Are Emerging

We are now well into the heart of the holiday shopping season.   Black Friday is a week and a half in the rearview mirror. 

Did any of the boycotts that Indivisible and other organizations called for make a difference?

You may recall – (you may have participated!) – Indivisible specifically urged its members to avoid three major retailers in particular during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend – Target, Amazon, and Home Depot.  Other organizations have been promoting more general “shop local” campaigns, and asking us to extend our economic leverage throughout the entire month of December.

We won’t know for a while, or perhaps ever with any certainty, what the total impact of boycotts was on this holiday season.  But some data is starting to be available.

RetailNext, the leading in-store traffic analytics provider, reported that foot traffic was down 3.6% on Friday and 8.6% on Saturday in the tens of thousands of stores nationwide that utilize their technology.   That is not necessarily attributable solely to consumer boycotts.  It is probably more a function of low consumer confidence in the face of inflation, job insecurity, and looming health insurance premium spikes.

It is also a matter of the increasing importance of online shopping, which continues to set records.  CBS News reported that one firm, Adobe Analytics, estimated $11.8 billion in revenue, which would have been a 9.1% increase over the previous year.  That sounds pretty robust.   But on the other hand, studies by Salesforce indicated that the average number of items purchased per shopper was down.   And according to Newsweek, “Mastercard, meanwhile, has forecast a 7.9 percent increase in e-commerce sales and a 2.3 percent rise in in-store sales. However, it added in its report that ‘inflation is expected to be a larger contributor to sales growth, as opposed to actual sales volume compared to last year.’”

Meanwhile, Amazon’s stock price has fluctuated mildly over the past several months.  Home Depot stock has fallen from $423 to $344 per share over the last 90 days.  Target stock has continued to trade between $83 and $97 per share since September.  It was worth $142 per share in January when the company abandoned its DEI programs and the boycott began.

The Call to Action?  Keep it up.  The boards and C-suites are whistling past the graveyard.

Spotify.

How many people have cancelled their Spotify subscriptions, or stopped using their free service?   We may know at some point in late January, when they release their quarterly earnings report.

Their last quarterly report, released in early November and covering the quarter ending September 30, was rosy. (https://www.thewrap.com/spotify-earnings-q3-2025/)  They reported adding 5 million new premium subscribers in the quarter, bringing their worldwide total to 281 million, and reported quarterly revenue of $4.9 billion.

That was just about the time they started getting pushback for running recruitment ads for ICE. 

That earnings report was also about the time that the price of a share of stock in Spotify peaked at $743.23.   It traded on December 9 at $589.67 – a drop of 17.3% over the past 90 days. 

Spotify has been aggressively promoting a “your first four months are free” subscription campaign for the past month, which doesn’t seem like a strategy of a company confident in its market share. 

So we will see in a few weeks whether their number of “paid” subscribers has grown or dwindled.  The number of new customers taking the “four months free” offer will very likely offset any observable loss of members cancelling their subscriptions.  But comparing the revenue per subscriber, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter, should be telling.

Meanwhile, a Spotify investor with 1000 shares of stock in the company, can’t be happy that their investment is worth $123,000 less today than it was before the company started running ICE recruitment ads.