In this day and age, it doesn’t seem to take much for people to get upset about products or companies and demand that everyone boycott them immediately, sometimes over trivial issues.
Quite often, it’s the kind of knuckle-draggers who vote for UKIP and moan incessantly about “immigrunts”. They’ve suggested boycotting Easter eggs because the word ‘Easter’ doesn’t appear on the packaging in some cases — spoiler alert: a lot of Easter eggs have always just had the words ‘chocolate egg’ on them and this goes back at least 40 years. Also, there was a huge carry on when someone asked one manufacturer if their eggs were halal and were told that yes, they were. “I’LL NEVER BUY YOUR PRODUCTS AGAIN!” raged some people, without spelling the sentence correctly, because the inhumane slaughter of cocoa beans to make them halal is something worth standing up for. Wait till these people find out that water and oxygen are also halal.
And there was of course the advert Gillette made where it suggested that men should be the best they could be and not be bastards to women — possibly a variation of their ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ slogan. Anyway, many men took it as an attack on men, the #notallmen-ists were out in force and a lot claimed they would never use a Gillette product ever again.
It’s probably only a matter of time before there’s also a movement to boycott crispy duck pancakes because China invented COVID-19.
But there are people who we should expect better of who are doing this too. Heck sausages should apparently be off the menu, according to some, because the company invited Boris Johnson to have a look around their factory before he was Prime Minister. It was most likely just a PR stunt and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the owners of the company are Conservative voters. But does that matter anyway? If you want to not eat sausages because you’re a vegetarian or vegan, then fine. If you think the company is unethical or treats its employees badly, then fine, stop buying their sausages. But the way someone may or may not vote? No. Would you refuse to shop at Holland & Barrett if you found out the managing director was one of those people who’d voted for Mrs Brown’s Boys as the greatest British sitcom of all time? No, you wouldn’t. You’d probably take the piss out of their decision, and rightly so, but it wouldn’t influence whether you patronised their business or not.
Wetherspoons is another one. Just because the man who owns the company and who has been likened to Worzel Gummidge and described as looking like a “homeless Thundercat” was a hugely vocal supporter of Brexit was no reason to boycott his pubs. Even when he covered the tables of his pubs with pro-Brexit beermats, put pro-Brexit posters in his pubs’ windows and half-filled the company magazine with badly-worded and often factually incorrect editorials which were also pro-Brexit, there was no reason to stop drinking in the pubs if you didn’t agree with him. Even though I’d often go to the pub to try and escape all the political toing and froing, it was, after all, just his opinion. However, general opinion on this has changed now, and his attempt to lay off all his staff and telling them to “go and work at Tesco” within seconds of the Government instructing all pubs to shut due to Coronavirus was a step too far. This was after he’d already claimed something along the lines of “it’s ridiculous to close pubs because very few people have caught the virus in pubs.” Putting profit before people doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. I’m not boycotting Wetherspoons though, I’m simply not going in. Obviously that’s an absolute piece of piss at the moment, but even when the pubs reopen, I’ll avoid his outlets.
Another businessman who has treated staff badly is obese plastic Geordie, Mike Ashley. There’s a certain amount of irony about a man who looks like him owning Britain’s largest sporting goods company, but people in glass houses…
Anyway, he tried to claim Sports Direct was an essential business and could “help Britain stay fit during the pandemic” and attempted to keep all of his stores open, with no safety measures in place for staff. He soon backtracked after mass outrage, but it has since been claimed that he still forced people to work in unsafe conditions both in stores where goods were being packed up for return to warehouses and in warehouses where online orders were fulfilled.
Again, I decided not to boycott Sports Direct, but simply to not use the company anymore.
In a pre-Coronavirus world, I used to buy my trainers from Sports Direct. One type in particular I have bought regularly in the last few years is slip-on Slazengers with memory foam insoles. They’re great for walking the dogs and are the only shoes I’ve ever found that solve the problem of getting a bad back when standing around at musical festivals for hours. They’re usually knackered within 8 months, but they’re only £20 a pair.
However, after deciding to no longer patronise Sports Direct, I needed to find an alternative outlet. I expected to have to pay more and I searched on eBay. There was a user selling them for the same price as Sports Direct. Excellent!
I paid £19.99 (plus £4.99 postage and packing) to a user called kickbacksports_outlet and felt like I’d done something good. The good feeling lasted about a minute until I received an email from PayPal. “Receipt for your payment to Sports Direct,” it said. What? It turns out kickbacksports_outlet is either Sports Direct’s channel on eBay or a subsidiary company, so even when trying to do the right thing, it’s wrong.
But unlike the Nike boycotters who decided to burn their shoes due to the company’s support of Colin Kaepernick, I’m keeping mine. Ashley has already had my money, but at least it won’t buy him much champagne.
The thing is, if any of us were truly bothered, we’d have stopped using Sports Direct years ago due to the poverty wages and zero hours contracts. We’d also have stopped using Amazon for the same reason, but it’s so convenient and it’s generally cheaper than anywhere else. And we’d have avoided companies like Starbucks who pay as little UK tax as they can get away with. But their coffee is so tasty.
We should support local businesses and help our communities thrive. But more often than not, local businesses are more expensive than the big guys, because they pay tax and don’t have buying power brought about by bending their suppliers over a barrel. It’s tough. So basically, just buy what you want from wherever you want, and if you can sleep safe at night, then all the better. We’re all doomed anyway.
