All of the pizza examples are about reducing cost. The argument about dating apps is about increasing retention. The dynamics are qualitatively different.
The argument with pizza is more like "people like salty, fatty food, so pizza places are incentivized to make their pizza less healthy so that people come back more often"... which is exactly what happens!
So why doesn't a legitimately healthy restaurant come along and take the whole market? It's partly because restaurants aren't just in the business of selling (healthy) food: it's also about convenience and satisfaction and experience. More importantly, that just doesn't fit with how people largely make day-to-day decisions.
The same thing happens with dating apps. People get drawn in for all sorts of reasons that don't necessarily map to getting married, even if finding a long-term relationship is explicitly their goal. Tinder competes with Tiktok more than it competes with other dating apps.
The other problem is that making a really effective dating app is just hard. It's fundamentally difficult to help people find compatible partners, especially without in-person contact. That's compounded by cultural and demographic issues. It doesn't matter how well your app is designed when there's a massive imbalance in genders!
Also, the pizza examples miss out the competition aspect. Pizza restaurants are competing against other pizza places, but also competing against other foods. If someone starts increasing the price and reducing quality of pizzas, then at some point people will start saying "I don't like pizza, let's go for a burger" and eventually a whole generation will grow up thinking that they don't like pizzas as they've only eaten crappy ones.
Ultimately, these kinds of things go in cycles with the population varying between choosing cheap and trashy products and choosing expensive, quality products.
Yep, Peter Drucker wrote about this all the way back in 1964.
> The competition is therefore all the other activities that compete for the rapidly growing “discretionary time” of a population
His examples were bowling ball manufacturers competing with lawn care companies, but the idea is the same, go up an abstraction layer, and the competition is for time.
This is a restating of an older idea that fancy restaurants aren't competing against other restaurants, they are competing against movie theatres. Because they are in the date entertainment market
People who uses dating apps are on a very specific mission (to get laid, a.k.a "to meet more interesting people"). They'll optimize their profile to specifically archive that goal.
TikTok accepts wider range of interest-based (instead of goal-based) contents, and have much wider demographic spread. On that platform, you show more aspect of you and your life to your viewers, and that creates a degree of trust and maybe even empathy, both are beneficial in creating a closer relationship.
And it's not just on TikTok, I first noticed the effect in online games. For example, people who act kindly often get a lot of friends, etc.
> The other problem is that making a really effective dating app is just hard. It's fundamentally difficult to help people find compatible partners, especially without in-person contact. That's compounded by cultural and demographic issues. It doesn't matter how well your app is designed when there's a massive imbalance in genders!
Really true. Most of dating seems to be dominated by that people want to be comfortable and dating is an inherently uncomfortable experience at times and many people seem to have a hard time with it.
I’m writing this as someone that made the conscious decision to face every form of uncomfortableness in dating if I noticed it was needed. Some people look at me bewildered with how I met my wife. They found what I did was way too much effort. But I am thinking to myself: you’re going to spend the most time with them! You better be damn sure that you’re long-term compatible.
Yet, enough people seem to act the whole process is more like buying something from your local Chipotle/<name your favorite establishment> where comfort is king.
Can you expand on what types of uncomfortableness you faced and what you mean by effort (to the point of bewildering people)? Curious what worked for you. Not sure if you just mean you forced yourself to go on a million dates and were super selective.
> So why doesn't a legitimately healthy restaurant come along and take the whole market?
The lesson is in revealed preferences. One of my friends, live him to death, has been trying to lose weight since forever. When we try to eat together, hell judge the food. Either what's in my pantry/freezer or from the restaurant we go it. He keeps talking about keto as well. He's pretty knowledgeable about things by this point. But he keeps being unable to lose the weight! Yet no matter how much he tells me or how right it actually is, the lesson is on revealed preferences, aka he's got a ton of dominos pizza boxes hiding out in the trash that he's been eating.
Losing weight is pretty simple. Just stop eating such much food. It's not easy though, unfortunately. That food is pretty delicious. All dating apps have to do, which coffee meets bagel was doing at back when, is rate limit the matches given to women. Let woman rate as many men as they want, but only show women the to p 15/whatever matches so they aren't overwhelmed. it's so obvious and simple, but hard to put into in practice, for reasons that have zero to do with anybody's ability to write code.
I honestly felt like “wtf” reading those examples.
Everything listed there as positives would lead exactly to user(patrons) retention.
For dating apps it’s the exact opposite.
Read the pizza example, and was like "this guy is really clueless". Read the car example (car makers are incentivized to make cars unsafe!), and thought, "This ignorant fool needs to shut up." Car makers are incentivized to make unsafe cars, and before there was such heavy regulation, did so.
> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them.
It's also not a cost-effective plan for most shoppers who have enough other expenses in their lives that they can't afford their food doubling in price.
Most of us are stuck in globally-horrible local maximums, and we aren't going to get out of them without some external push.
> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them.
It's not just "not cost-effective", it's not technically feasible.
Do you want to grow enough food to feed maybe a couple of dozen people and spend every waking minute doing it, or do you want to scale out to feed everyone including the vast majority of the population who do no useful work?
The article misses the most important factor: the customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more. The higher prices could just as well be for completely unrelated reasons (greed, inefficiency, ...). No one is going around measuring and documenting every single difference between products and services, and, even if someone did, almost no one has time to do such thorough research for every purchase. It is increasingly difficult to find objective information about any commercial product. Any attempt at providing impartial information gets drowned in an ocean of marketing content, sponsored reviews, astroturfing, and brand tribalism.
Consequence of the above is that marketing and anecdotal evidence are much more influential factors in purchase decisions than quality of the product. Using marketing campaigns to brainwash people is significantly easier (and cheaper) than improving a product enough for them to notice – especially if the product already has a zombie customer base that chooses a familiar brand out of habit rather than merit. We have built a world where money is valued over value, and making better products is often a terrible business strategy.
> Customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more.
If you search on Google Flights, the seat pitch is clearly displayed, or you can use third party tools like Seatmaps.
But many people use airline sites directly, don't understand or care, or as the article correctly asserts, care more about the price than anything else.
Or maybe consumers do not want to (because it doesn't make economic sense for them, or because they don't want to spend every second of their free time optimizing) spend a significant amount of their time doing this kind of research before every purchase decision? I have never understood this argument that as long as information is technically available companies should be absolved of meeting some minimum level of baseline quality. You're also describing an industry that's unusually transparent (in part because there are not that many models of planes); for a lot of online goods there is absolutely no reasonable way you can know what a particular brand will be like before you buy.
Even if the information is technically available, a business can sit there optimising for a specific problem while individuals have to deal with tens or hundreds of separate problems every day. We have to satisfice and finer details like this are usually ignored.
The 'zombie customer base'explains much of everything wrong in today's society packed to the brim by stupid people. If you find yourself in the 98th percentile, prepare to be disappointed by just about everything available in today's society.
I don't think comparing the dating app to a pizza restaurant makes the dating app argument fall apart. The difference is that even a satisfied customer will get hungry again, so it's possible to provide a really good experience and still have that customer come back. A dating app is unique (or, at least in a different category) in that the best possible outcome for the user (assuming monogamy) is that the user deletes the app and never uses it again.
More fundamentally--if a good product keeps a customer coming back for more there's an incentive to provide a good product. If a happy customer doesn't have any reason to come back there's no value in creating a happy customer.
Note that "come back" needs to be interpreted broadly. For example, a Osprey backpack--lifetime warranty against most anything, doesn't look like there's any space for repeat customers. But--those of us who would buy something like that very well might want different sizes. And I would certainly recommend them to others who were in the market for a serious backpack. (And, yes, they do honor the warranty--had a buckle snap, I sent them pictures, they offered to repair it, or ship me the part and I do it myself. Took the latter option, a few days later I had a strap and buckle that I threaded through my pack, good as new other than the color didn't match.)
But similarly to you recommending the Osprey backpack to your friends because you are a happy customer, happy/successful customers of a dating site will spread the word.
> A dating app is unique (or, at least in a different category) in that the best possible outcome for the user (assuming monogamy) is that the user deletes the app and never uses it again.
I'm sure I've read that there's one where that is the advertising tagline, something like "The dating app you're going to delete!"
Pretty strong statement to be honest, I wish I'd thought of that.
luckily for the opportunists that make products that capitalize on human psychology for profit, strict monogamy for life with one individual is not natural!
The article mentions light bulb durability. There was a cartel, the awesomely-named Phoebus Cartel [1] that encouraged its members to reduce the typical operating life of bulbs from 2500 hours to 1000 hours to increase bulb sales.
So the author's list of 'Why Stuff is Bad' should * certainly * include 'lack of anti-trust laws and enforcement'. Rent-seeking, anti-trust, regulatory capture should all be mentioned in this under-thought blog product.
Seriously, not mentioning useful regulation and standards as a countermeasure to the negative trends the author describes seems like willful blindness.
> Why is food so expensive at sporting events? ... why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead? I don’t know. Probably something complicated, like that expensive food allows you to extract extra money from rich people without losing business from non-rich people.
Because there's at least two additional parties to concession revenues beyond the venue operator: the home team, who often takes up to 50% of the revenue, and concessionaires, who employ the servers and supply the actual food.
Venue operators and sports teams don't like the liability and cost exposures of serving food, so they farm it to a third party. And rather than carve that up into multiple competing vendors, most modern large venues hand it to a single hospitality company, who uses scale to lower costs and offer a lower share of revenue in exchange for exclusivity over all venue food service. Without competition, they can jack the price up.
Worth noting two things on the "why not raise ticket prices" angle: ticketing is moving in the same outsourced direction as concessions, and ticket prices are going up anyway (up >100% since 1999[1]).
> Across pro sports, Matheson says, teams are making the determination that "they can make more money selling fewer, more expensive tickets rather than lots of cheap seats."
Most venues have given up having their own box offices and farm that out to StubHub, TicketMaster, etc. Same motivations, same result: the venue spends less by contracting out ticketing, the team gets a bigger cut of the revenue, and the ticket vendors get exclusive control not only over selling the tickets but reselling them, with dark patterns like dynamic pricing and fees piled onto the buyer at every part of every transaction.
Both wipe out all competition on both quality and price. Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. Apply that pattern to existing fanbases grown over generations during eras of better prices or quality and you get a captive audience who complains constantly but never quits spending, so there's no pressure to lower prices or improve quality.
>Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose.
But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time.
And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I might otherwise both because of the absolute cost and because it feels bad to pay a bunch for a ticket and then also have to pay like $15 for a hot dog. And I take my kids to fewer than my parents took me to for similar reasons.
I stopped caring about my favourite sports teams approximately 10 years ago, and now that I have kids, I probably won't ever take them to a pro game, and they'll probably grow up barely knowing what they are. They're completely cannibalised any kind of future for themselves, because I'm not the only person I know who's done this.
My friend who were big time fans of a certain Southern California team also completely abandoned an interest in sports when the team moved to LA. I asked one buddy what he did with his season tickets. "Burned 'em." He also used to put $1,000 every year on the team winning the Super Bowl. My other buddy threw all his fan stuff like a jersey in the rubbish.
This is the same pro sports industry that already stops you watching matches on TV once a week, spreads them over several different streaming platforms so you pay several times, and is currently trying to make it so you can't watch matches on devices that can sideload apps. Apparently, their revenue has only been going up, even with all these shitty things already happening...
I would add that there is psychology at play as well. Someone might scoff at a $200 ticket, thinking it's ridiculous to pay that much, even if you could then eat at the venue for $20.
But they'll pay $100 for a ticket, feeling it's reasonable, and then end spending $120 on concessions and beer anyway. The smells, sights, atmosphere and wanting to "just enjoy it" are compelling forces to reach for your wallet IMHO.
Definitely. There's almost always a strong incentive to move charges as far back into the flow as possible. Knock $5 off your ISP package price, then hit them with a $5 "infrastructure fee" at the credit card screen. For consumers, just because you picked a higher upfront price for a service doesn't mean you'll you won't be nickle-and-dimed later in addition, so it is not trivial to avoid. I guess you can view the "free with ads" model as the most popular implementation: get people in the door and then charge them with their time at crazy rates.
The OP's author is at the beginning of the path towards understanding that Nash Equilibria are everywhere in the economy. I say this because the OP doesn't realize that's what he's talking about: Nash Equilibria.
A company's strategy, tactics, and individual decisions are always constrained by its competitors, customers, societal laws and norms, etc. For example, if a company faces a competitor that is grabbing market share by offering a cheaper product that is slightly worse, the company may have no choice but to lower the quality of its products so it can compete successfully.
This is why I fail to see the value in boycotts at this point. Anything that I boycott will be cancelled out probably 10 fold by people happy to buy from that place still or just required.
Like I'm not willing to pay certain prices for things like I fly less because the experience is worse than it should be, by a lot and I can't handle paying 10x more for the business class option. So I'm just stuck doing it. And there are plenty of people who are happy to do it still.
So you end up left with a rock and a hard place. Do I not travel? Do I not go buy that thing? Do I not do these things that would possibly add happiness to my life to fight price gouging? Especially when you know that for every 1 of you there are 6 other people happy to pay the price or buy the thing.
It feels like a lot of these big companies are just too big to fail at this point and abuse us for it.
The average "boycott" is not even organized, has no particular goal, and is just meant to make the boycotter feel morally superior. I bet Starbucks execs giggle every time they hear about the next boycott. The people calling for the boycott probably haven't been in a Starbucks in 15 years, and they don't have any intention of becoming regular customers if they do.
Thinking of boycotts that have worked in the past, they generally had specific demands and a plan to resume normal consumption when those demands were met. The Gallo wine boycott in the 70s was successful. The workers had a clear case, simple demands, a desire to negotiate, and a call to boycott one specific winery until they came to the table. When they did, the boycott was lifted and the majority of boycotters went back to consuming the wine.
On the other hand, if I decided to boycott Gallo wine, they wouldn't notice, because I don't think I've bought a bottle of Gallo in my life, and I haven't given a good reason to do it for other people to join me.
Just a note that my "Starbucks boycott" thing refers to the people over the years who have boycotted Starbucks for random greivances, not the organized union boycott, that might have some success.
I used to think, "I'll stop shopping here! They'll change their policies!", and yeah, nope, what happens is the company just leans into the customers that remained. So my "boycott" didn't do anything but deprive me of something I wanted.
However, I decided that, at least for a certain set of things, my desire for the thing can be outweighed by my desire not to contribute to something.
So boycott's aren't about me changing a company's policies, they're about me allocating my resources towards the things I want to see in the world.
Boycotts don’t work unless they are organized and articulate a concrete demand. I respect boycotts that have an organization behind them and a clear end goal, even if that goal may be far off.
When organizers ask for a boycott that may take years, their goal should be worthy to justify the consumer pain. BDS is a good example, it will take a while but stopping the apartheid Israeli regime is good.
To a first approximation, boycotts never work. The concept exists as an opiate and sop make you think you have power as a consumer and that regulations are unnecessary, but it's a mirage.
Tesla sales tell a different story. The people who were all for Tesla are fleeing and when he had his brief moment of MAGA alignment, it didn’t help because most of them didn’t have the money and/or desire to buy an EV.
Tesla is having sells issues world wide due to a large part because of Musk.
Another recent example how fast Disney turned around and bought Kimmel back after people started cancelling Disney+ subscriptions left and right.
Disney had to ignore pressure from Trump and the FCC. It definitely wasn’t a principled stand - they were one of the ones who bribed Trump personally.
Readit News
The argument with pizza is more like "people like salty, fatty food, so pizza places are incentivized to make their pizza less healthy so that people come back more often"... which is exactly what happens!
So why doesn't a legitimately healthy restaurant come along and take the whole market? It's partly because restaurants aren't just in the business of selling (healthy) food: it's also about convenience and satisfaction and experience. More importantly, that just doesn't fit with how people largely make day-to-day decisions.
The same thing happens with dating apps. People get drawn in for all sorts of reasons that don't necessarily map to getting married, even if finding a long-term relationship is explicitly their goal. Tinder competes with Tiktok more than it competes with other dating apps.
The other problem is that making a really effective dating app is just hard. It's fundamentally difficult to help people find compatible partners, especially without in-person contact. That's compounded by cultural and demographic issues. It doesn't matter how well your app is designed when there's a massive imbalance in genders!
Ultimately, these kinds of things go in cycles with the population varying between choosing cheap and trashy products and choosing expensive, quality products.
is a crazy remark, but I think you're right. We're living in weird time!
> The competition is therefore all the other activities that compete for the rapidly growing “discretionary time” of a population
His examples were bowling ball manufacturers competing with lawn care companies, but the idea is the same, go up an abstraction layer, and the competition is for time.
People who uses dating apps are on a very specific mission (to get laid, a.k.a "to meet more interesting people"). They'll optimize their profile to specifically archive that goal.
TikTok accepts wider range of interest-based (instead of goal-based) contents, and have much wider demographic spread. On that platform, you show more aspect of you and your life to your viewers, and that creates a degree of trust and maybe even empathy, both are beneficial in creating a closer relationship.
And it's not just on TikTok, I first noticed the effect in online games. For example, people who act kindly often get a lot of friends, etc.
Really true. Most of dating seems to be dominated by that people want to be comfortable and dating is an inherently uncomfortable experience at times and many people seem to have a hard time with it.
I’m writing this as someone that made the conscious decision to face every form of uncomfortableness in dating if I noticed it was needed. Some people look at me bewildered with how I met my wife. They found what I did was way too much effort. But I am thinking to myself: you’re going to spend the most time with them! You better be damn sure that you’re long-term compatible.
Yet, enough people seem to act the whole process is more like buying something from your local Chipotle/<name your favorite establishment> where comfort is king.
The lesson is in revealed preferences. One of my friends, live him to death, has been trying to lose weight since forever. When we try to eat together, hell judge the food. Either what's in my pantry/freezer or from the restaurant we go it. He keeps talking about keto as well. He's pretty knowledgeable about things by this point. But he keeps being unable to lose the weight! Yet no matter how much he tells me or how right it actually is, the lesson is on revealed preferences, aka he's got a ton of dominos pizza boxes hiding out in the trash that he's been eating.
Losing weight is pretty simple. Just stop eating such much food. It's not easy though, unfortunately. That food is pretty delicious. All dating apps have to do, which coffee meets bagel was doing at back when, is rate limit the matches given to women. Let woman rate as many men as they want, but only show women the to p 15/whatever matches so they aren't overwhelmed. it's so obvious and simple, but hard to put into in practice, for reasons that have zero to do with anybody's ability to write code.
They don't produce food; they produce shareholder wealth. That's their goal.
Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them.
It's also not a cost-effective plan for most shoppers who have enough other expenses in their lives that they can't afford their food doubling in price.
Most of us are stuck in globally-horrible local maximums, and we aren't going to get out of them without some external push.
It's not just "not cost-effective", it's not technically feasible.
Do you want to grow enough food to feed maybe a couple of dozen people and spend every waking minute doing it, or do you want to scale out to feed everyone including the vast majority of the population who do no useful work?
Consequence of the above is that marketing and anecdotal evidence are much more influential factors in purchase decisions than quality of the product. Using marketing campaigns to brainwash people is significantly easier (and cheaper) than improving a product enough for them to notice – especially if the product already has a zombie customer base that chooses a familiar brand out of habit rather than merit. We have built a world where money is valued over value, and making better products is often a terrible business strategy.
If you search on Google Flights, the seat pitch is clearly displayed, or you can use third party tools like Seatmaps.
But many people use airline sites directly, don't understand or care, or as the article correctly asserts, care more about the price than anything else.
It’s less that most people don’t care instead it’s often a completely reasonable tradeoff.
Note that "come back" needs to be interpreted broadly. For example, a Osprey backpack--lifetime warranty against most anything, doesn't look like there's any space for repeat customers. But--those of us who would buy something like that very well might want different sizes. And I would certainly recommend them to others who were in the market for a serious backpack. (And, yes, they do honor the warranty--had a buckle snap, I sent them pictures, they offered to repair it, or ship me the part and I do it myself. Took the latter option, a few days later I had a strap and buckle that I threaded through my pack, good as new other than the color didn't match.)
I'm sure I've read that there's one where that is the advertising tagline, something like "The dating app you're going to delete!"
Pretty strong statement to be honest, I wish I'd thought of that.
So the author's list of 'Why Stuff is Bad' should * certainly * include 'lack of anti-trust laws and enforcement'. Rent-seeking, anti-trust, regulatory capture should all be mentioned in this under-thought blog product.
Seriously, not mentioning useful regulation and standards as a countermeasure to the negative trends the author describes seems like willful blindness.
[1] Phoebus Cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
That's why that one bulb that's been burning for a 100 years in a firestation somewhere is only just glowing.
Oh, they do. But Match Groups buys it and either:
a) they get to cover certain niche of the market they weren't monetizing (Indiamatch, Chispa, Ldsplanet...)
b) they leave it to die so people move to other apps (Like OKCupid, the only app I know that has less features with every update)
Just check their brands [0]: Match, Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid, Plenty of fish, Our time, The League...
--
Because there's at least two additional parties to concession revenues beyond the venue operator: the home team, who often takes up to 50% of the revenue, and concessionaires, who employ the servers and supply the actual food.
Venue operators and sports teams don't like the liability and cost exposures of serving food, so they farm it to a third party. And rather than carve that up into multiple competing vendors, most modern large venues hand it to a single hospitality company, who uses scale to lower costs and offer a lower share of revenue in exchange for exclusivity over all venue food service. Without competition, they can jack the price up.
Worth noting two things on the "why not raise ticket prices" angle: ticketing is moving in the same outsourced direction as concessions, and ticket prices are going up anyway (up >100% since 1999[1]).
> Across pro sports, Matheson says, teams are making the determination that "they can make more money selling fewer, more expensive tickets rather than lots of cheap seats."
Most venues have given up having their own box offices and farm that out to StubHub, TicketMaster, etc. Same motivations, same result: the venue spends less by contracting out ticketing, the team gets a bigger cut of the revenue, and the ticket vendors get exclusive control not only over selling the tickets but reselling them, with dark patterns like dynamic pricing and fees piled onto the buyer at every part of every transaction.
Both wipe out all competition on both quality and price. Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. Apply that pattern to existing fanbases grown over generations during eras of better prices or quality and you get a captive audience who complains constantly but never quits spending, so there's no pressure to lower prices or improve quality.
1: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5561909/ticket-prices-s...
But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time.
And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I might otherwise both because of the absolute cost and because it feels bad to pay a bunch for a ticket and then also have to pay like $15 for a hot dog. And I take my kids to fewer than my parents took me to for similar reasons.
My friend who were big time fans of a certain Southern California team also completely abandoned an interest in sports when the team moved to LA. I asked one buddy what he did with his season tickets. "Burned 'em." He also used to put $1,000 every year on the team winning the Super Bowl. My other buddy threw all his fan stuff like a jersey in the rubbish.
But they'll pay $100 for a ticket, feeling it's reasonable, and then end spending $120 on concessions and beer anyway. The smells, sights, atmosphere and wanting to "just enjoy it" are compelling forces to reach for your wallet IMHO.
A company's strategy, tactics, and individual decisions are always constrained by its competitors, customers, societal laws and norms, etc. For example, if a company faces a competitor that is grabbing market share by offering a cheaper product that is slightly worse, the company may have no choice but to lower the quality of its products so it can compete successfully.
Like I'm not willing to pay certain prices for things like I fly less because the experience is worse than it should be, by a lot and I can't handle paying 10x more for the business class option. So I'm just stuck doing it. And there are plenty of people who are happy to do it still.
So you end up left with a rock and a hard place. Do I not travel? Do I not go buy that thing? Do I not do these things that would possibly add happiness to my life to fight price gouging? Especially when you know that for every 1 of you there are 6 other people happy to pay the price or buy the thing.
It feels like a lot of these big companies are just too big to fail at this point and abuse us for it.
Thinking of boycotts that have worked in the past, they generally had specific demands and a plan to resume normal consumption when those demands were met. The Gallo wine boycott in the 70s was successful. The workers had a clear case, simple demands, a desire to negotiate, and a call to boycott one specific winery until they came to the table. When they did, the boycott was lifted and the majority of boycotters went back to consuming the wine.
On the other hand, if I decided to boycott Gallo wine, they wouldn't notice, because I don't think I've bought a bottle of Gallo in my life, and I haven't given a good reason to do it for other people to join me.
I used to think, "I'll stop shopping here! They'll change their policies!", and yeah, nope, what happens is the company just leans into the customers that remained. So my "boycott" didn't do anything but deprive me of something I wanted.
However, I decided that, at least for a certain set of things, my desire for the thing can be outweighed by my desire not to contribute to something.
So boycott's aren't about me changing a company's policies, they're about me allocating my resources towards the things I want to see in the world.
When organizers ask for a boycott that may take years, their goal should be worthy to justify the consumer pain. BDS is a good example, it will take a while but stopping the apartheid Israeli regime is good.
https://bdsmovement.net/
A less intensive campaign is the Starbucks Union’s no contract no coffee pledge, which presumably will last only weeks to months.
https://www.nocontractnocoffee.org/
Tesla is having sells issues world wide due to a large part because of Musk.
Another recent example how fast Disney turned around and bought Kimmel back after people started cancelling Disney+ subscriptions left and right.
Disney had to ignore pressure from Trump and the FCC. It definitely wasn’t a principled stand - they were one of the ones who bribed Trump personally.
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