Making a Statement With Your Holiday Shopping

We are going to spend the next three weeks – maybe the next seven weeks – revisiting the idea that we can shape some major corporations’ assessment of their collaboration with the Trump regime, by redirecting our holiday spending.

Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

Don’t think of your budget as a drop in the bucket, a futile gesture. Think of it as a rehearsal, getting practice at thinking globally about your purchasing power.  Real impact will come when millions of us are informed and engaged enough to act in unison.  But the corporations that do quarterly projections based on intense scrutiny of the slightest trends will know before the Wall Street Journal does, that we are moving the needle.

Be An Informed Consumer

The biggest thing to do is to shop locally whenever possible.  Reconsider the big Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales at the big box stores.  The failure of those two days to exceed last year’s numbers will send a message.  

If you have been doing your annual household planning around the idea of major purchases doing double duty as Christmas presents … do a little extra research.  

We have been exploring how to be an informed consumer, with the GoodsUniteUs website and app, the ShopHowYouVote website, and the 1792 Exchange website.

GoodsUniteUs and ShopHowYouVote are similar, in that their primary methodology for evaluating companies is to look at the political giving of the corporation itself and its board of directors and executive officers.  The GoodsUniteUs app has been around for a while, is easily available in your GooglePlay or AppleStore – and once it is on your phone, you can look up brands in seconds, making each grocery shopping trip an exercise in rewarding or punishing dozens of businesses!  (Take THAT, Goya beans and Yuengling beer!)  It also seems to have a larger database of individual brands than ShopHowYouVote.  In GoodsUniteUs you search by the brand or company, see the percentages and totals of political giving in the most recent year, and then get a list of customer reviews (which may not be reliable), and links to five alternative brands. 

ShopHowYouVote’s website is great in that it lets you search by company name OR by industry.   However, the industry lists are not as complete as you might wish … the grocery chain list, for instance, does not yet include Kroger.   However, for the companies it does list, it has more information than GoodsUniteUs, including a comparison of THIS YEAR’s political giving, to the last FOUR years, which shows some interesting trends in both directions.  It also includes lists of each brand’s subsidiaries, and links to the company website.  ShopHowYouVote promotes a downloadable app, but at the time of this writing it was not yet available on GooglePlay.  The website itself, of course, is still viewable on a browser on your phone.

Of course, just tracking political giving doesn’t give you a complete picture of which businesses to support and which ones to insistently avoid. 

There are businesses that do still follow good environmental practices because they understand it is good for the bottom line, even while their ownership supports Republican candidates.  There are companies where the leadership supports Democratic candidates, but the business itself might have questionable labor practices (for instance, 89% of Starbucks’ political giving goes to Democrats, but you won’t find a complete analysis of their positions on unionization on GoodsUniteUs).  Target and Amazon are two other notable large businesses where the executives still give more money to Democrats than to Republicans; but they are being boycotted because of their “owners’” betrayal of their historic values.

So to expand our research a little further, we turned to a tool developed by “the other side” – a website called The 1792 Exchange, run by an organization that is committed to denouncing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as not only bad business but divisive and morally corrupt.   1792 Exchange is searchable by company, and includes not only information on their political contributions, but also on their corporate policies on DEI and Social and Environmental Government, rating businesses as high, medium, or low-risk – that is, in their opinion, companies considering diversity or the environment over or in addition to maximizing profit are high risk investments.  So we can look at the companies that they consider low risk investments, and cross them off our list of entities we will do business with.

That’s a lot of research to conduct before choosing a restaurant for your next lunch date, but it can be useful before major purchases, or reviewing your recurring household purchases, and certainly before holiday shopping.

Buying a computer this season?  You’re in luck.  Apple, Dell, and Lenovo  give between 78% and 92% of their political giving to Democratic causes, and even Hewlett Packard is “solidly blue.”  And the 1792 Exchange hates all of them!  Toshiba seems to be the major brand that is solidly behind right-wing politics.

We encourage you to use these apps and make your own decisions about your purchasing.  Next week we will share some observations and suggestions about making local buying decisions, including the value and the limitations of “Blue Business” Facebook pages.

But our call to action this week is still … start thinking NOW about your holiday shopping plans.  Alter them if necessary.   Shop local.  We aren’t going to topple Wall Street and Madison Avenue next month, but we can start learning how to wield our power, and recruiting others to join us.  And with corporate executives who need 3 to 5% growth to survive, a holiday season with even slight retraction may get boardrooms considering realignments in 2026.

Spotify Boycott Update

It is too early to tell whether the boycott of audio-streaming service Spotify over their decision to run ICE recruitment ads is going to have legs, or change the company’s behavior.  But as of Monday of this week, its stock was down almost 9 points over the past 30 days.   That equates to a loss of nearly $13 billion in “market capitalization.” 

To revisit last week’s blog, the purpose of the Spotify boycott being promoted by the national Indivisible organization and others, is to change Spotify’s behavior, not to burn the company to the ground.   We want Spotify to stop accepting money to run recruitment ads for an agency that has become a domestic paramilitary organization … ads that are dishonest, dystopian and racist.   Once they disavow that practice, we can and should reward them by enjoying their services again.  And let other businesses take notice.  

Indivisible chose Spotify not because they are the only company running these ads, or the worst; but because their subscription-based business model makes them vulnerable to effective economic action.

So … we are encouraging paid Spotify customers to cancel their subscriptions.  Users of their free service should just avoid it for a while, and seek out alternatives like Pandora, Soundcloud, Tidal, Deezer, etc.  And everyone can keep Googling the phrase, “How do I cancel my Spotify subscription?” They will be tracking that!