Sunday, August 23, 2009

Impact of Whole Foods Boycott

In a previous post I discussed my belief that the lefty boycott of Whole Foods would fail "because recycled organic self-righteousness has its economic limits." Apparently, some diarists over at DailyKos (the Great Orange to the insiders there) have the same complaint about themselves. Although the Whole Foods boycott is not specifically called out, here is what diarist The Sinastral (no I didn't make that up) has to say about the left in his ironically titled diary "We're Incompetent and Here's How We'll Win"

We’re wishy-washy. We’re opportunists without discipline. With the exception of some outstanding progressive heroes like nyceve, the majority of us are reactionaries. One of the reasons so few people outside the Great Orange take us seriously is that we undermine ourselves with our own inconsistency. It’s a word that I’m going to hit again and again here.

We’ve given our money. We’ve given our time. We’ve organized ourselves surprisingly well for such a populous movement. We have a fundraising arm. We have an annual conference. We have our own polls. We have Kos TV and Congress Matters. We have plenty of leaders in our ranks who work tirelessly on our behalf. It’s not that we’re not passionate. We are everything we need to win...except...we are not consistent. Our threats carry no weight because our opinions will change tomorrow. Our lobbying gains little momentum because our attention is always flitting away to the newest shiny object. Our righteous indignation has limited motivational powers because we never stick to a campaign. Remember The Path to 9/11? Most of us decided that it just wasn’t convenient enough to carry on that boycott, given that Disney is everywhere we look. And forget about the excuses we concoct to shop at Wal-Mart; most of us are of the opinion that boycotting them would be like boycotting the sun. Our resignation bolsters the very power we so despise in them. But, hey. They’re nearby, and they’re the only store around—having driven the competition out of business, of course.


Brought to you by B-Daddy: "Reading DailyKos so you won't have to."

Meanwhile, the impact of the boycott is yet to be felt (scroll down to 8th paragraph in the NYT article). More tellingly, stock picking technical analyst Zachary Scheidt doesn't even mention the boycott when analyzing the current stock price. (he says sell, because the pendulum has swung too far to optimism for WFMI.)

Finally, my search for pictures of the energized activists protesting whole foods yielded this one image.

2 comments:

  1. The boycott of whole foods is coyote ugly. Those fools are just not that desperate.

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  2. The Big Orange? That sounds like something Whole Foods would sell.

    In any case, the guy's post boils down into this: "We're a bunch of children."

    ReplyDelete