Let's hear it for the boycott

The moral vanity brigade is on the march through social media, outrageously outraged over Hobby Lobby and they are calling for a boycott. Megan McArdle makes the salient point:

Most boycotts fail because most people just don’t have the intensity to keep them up. In 2003, folks were promising to boycott French products such as Dannon yogurt over the country’s stance on Iraq, but Dannon is still on the shelves and seems to be selling well. A few years later, liberals were going to boycott Whole Foods because … well, I don’t remember what the CEO had done, but I’m sure it was something. Whole Foods is also suffering — from increased competition in its core business. The boycott seems to have had little to no effect.

It’s just hard to maintain that sort of intensity when you’re busy and vacation is coming up, and Mom needs help with her computer, and yes, honey, I’ll stop on the way home and pick up more yogurt. For all but the most bitterly partisan of partisans, motivation eventually gives way to more pressing concerns such as convenience.

Culture warriors face two additional problems: 

• They tend to want to boycott places they never shopped at in the first place.

• The company’s actual core demographic takes umbrage about the boycott and stages a much more effective counterboycott.

McArdle is right, of course. She talks at length in the article about the failed boycott of Chick-fil-A, which you might recall. On the other hand, about the only boycott that I can remember working was that of a different sort of Chick, the Dixie Chicks. You might recall the Dixie Chicks, who were having a pretty nice career in the country music business, until they started popping off about the war a decade or so ago. A lot of country music fans essentially cut them out and the radio stations that were playing their music did so as well. While these moves didn't completely kill their careers, it hurt them a lot.

So what is the difference between what the Perennially Indignant* are braying about today and what happened to the Dixie Chicks? The facts were different. The Dixie Chicks had two problems:

(a) they pissed off their core demographic, and
(b) the people who were going to rush to support the Dixie Chicks weren't country music fans and didn't follow up on their pledges to buy records.

More from McArdle:

Back to Hobby Lobby. Their demographic is women! I have heard cry. And women will be outraged!

Indeed, many women are. But which women?

At least in my circles, everyone in the crafting demographic meets at least one of the following criteria, and often all of them: conservative, Christian, married, older, stay-at-home mom. I’m not saying this is universal; I’m sure there are young, single, progressive crafters out there! But the overlap between the people in my Facebook feed proclaiming a boycott and the people in my Facebook feed whom I know to be frequenters of crafting stores is basically zero. The people with the passion are not the people who will be crafting, in other words.

Yep. I would wager that most of the outraged social media commenters on my FB feed have never set foot in a Hobby Lobby. They've been effectively boycotting Hobby Lobby for years, anyway. The good news is they're already ahead of the curve.

Of course, such concerned citizens do have options. They can always give their money to a politician who really supports women.

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* "Perennially Indignant" is a term originally coined by P. J. O'Rourke. I highly recommend it.