Two business writers at the New York Times alerted America just the other day that shopping has, in the age of POTUS #45 and his self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, emoluments clause-violating ways, suddenly "become" political.
Julie Creswell and Rachel Abrams, authors of a Feb. 10 piece, "Shopping becomes a political act in the Trump era," did a solid job of reporting on the current boycott-don't boycott battle being waged between opponents and supporters of the new administration. But they ignored history.
If you grew up in a family like mine, politics and social causes regularly played into the purchase decisions that my mom and dad made. I knew from an early age that we'd never find Sugar Daddies in our kitchen candy drawer: they were made by the Welch family, whose patriarch was a founder of the John Birch Society. There would never be a Ford in the garage: Henry Ford may have been a master of mass production, but he was an anti-Semite, and my dad was Jewish. We drove Chevys.
Heck, even the house I grew up in was a social justice-inspired purchase. My dad -- an Army officer in World War II -- left the military after the war's end, disillusioned by the racial segregation he'd seen in the armed forces. He and my mom could have bought a home in one of the "better" post-war suburban tracts of 3-bedroom, 2-bath stucco ranch homes popping up across the San Fernando Valley in the early 1950s. But they bought in the less desirable northeast corner of the Valley because deeds to the homes there didn't include racial covenants. I came of age believing that everyone was equal, and could live wherever they wanted -- and that everyone else in America thought so, too.
While I eventually was disabused of that idealistic notion, my appreciation of purchase choices as political power continued to grow. We added Carl's Jr. to the don't-go-there list after Carl Karcher's extreme right-wing positions became known. Ditto for Olive Garden when its owners took an anti-gay-rights stand. And Wal-Mart has always been on the family boycott list, given its habit of undercutting Mom & Pop businesses to make it the only place left to shop in small towns, its push to limit employee work hours to avoid having to provide health benefits (and instead directing its employees to apply for public-funded Medicaid), and its resistance to unionization and a living wage.
Today, Whole Foods and Papa John's Pizza have been added to my own family's no-go list -- their owners having fought the Affordable Care Act, and Papa John slashing employees' work hours to keep them off his health insurance plan. Chick-fil-A is there too, thanks to its we'd-rather-hire-Christians religious bigotry and its anti-gay stance.
So, no, New York Times, you're wrong: shopping politically has always been a "thing." It's just more noticeable today. In the days before the Internet, people in Hoboken had no idea that folks in Hollywood were also driving past their local Carl's Jr. and eating at Wendy's instead. Clevelanders didn't know that California table grapes were being boycotted until wire services ran photos of Bobby Kennedy marching in California with Cesar Chavez and striking United Farm Workers union members.
While boycotts didn't come with a hashtag -- like the impactful #GrabYourWallet effort Creswell and Abrams wrote about -- and didn't grow as big or as quickly as they do today, they've always been a weapon in the political and social justice arsenal. They grow out of the same age-old effort by people who want to fight injustice, hatred and discrimination by using the most powerful weapon we possess: our hard-earned dollars.
No comments:
Post a Comment