Do you boycott?

I was in college when news broke that Chick-fil-A’s leadership had come out against marriage equality. I grew up in Georgia, where there’s a Chick-fil-A on every corner. It was a top pick for my friends and me in high school. But when I saw that headline, something shifted. I thought: I don’t want to support them anymore.

That was my first real attempt at aligning my wallet with my values. And over a decade later, I’m still trying.1 But it’s hard, and I can’t help but wonder if boycotts even make a difference anyway.

Boycotts have definitely led to measurable change in the past. We learn about the Montgomery bus boycott in school; it’s inspiring and empowering, and it’s what I think about when I think about a successful boycott.

But what’s often glossed over is how long the boycott actually lasted. After Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955 for refusing to give up her seat, residents of Montgomery, Alabama, stopped riding city buses for 381 days. I repeat: 381 days. That’s over a year of walking to work in the Alabama heat and cold, organizing carpools, and enduring harassment and violence.

It wasn’t a single moment of refusal. It was a sustained inconvenience, repeated daily, by thousands of people. The boycott worked not because everyone did something one time, but because thousands of people made the same inconvenient choice over and over again.

Today’s boycotts feel different. They tend to be less localized, and they feel more ‘social media viral’ to me.2

In early 2025, Target rolled back its DEI commitments, walking back a $2 billion pledge to Black-owned businesses it had made in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The boycott that followed was led by Rev. Dr. Jamal Bryant, a Georgia pastor who launched what he called a “Target Fast” during Lent. Foot traffic declined for months, and Target's CEO acknowledged on an earnings call that the boycott had played a role in the company's first-quarter sales decline. But, as the company is still very much around, Target obviously did not experience a catastrophic long-term collapse due to the boycott.

Another recent example is the Tesla boycott. Once a car that environmentally conscious buyers were proud to own, the Tesla brand became something many owners wanted to distance themselves from as Musk's politics moved further to the right.3 After he spent early 2025 openly campaigning for far-right parties, the internet did what the internet does. Videos of people returning their Teslas went viral. Protesters showed up at dealerships. By the end of 2025, Tesla recorded the largest sales decline in their history.

But despite that, the research seems to show that if it’s a big enough company, boycotts rarely hurt revenue in the long run. What seems to be the number-one predictor of a boycott’s effectiveness is how much media attention it generates. Boycotts seem to play a larger role in branding and reputation than in actual finances.

I want my boycotting to have an impact on finances. But that doesn’t seem to be the reality. Where they do seem to have an impact is in influencing company behavior.

Which brings me back to Chick-fil-A. When the boycott hit in 2012, customer visits actually increased in the months that followed. There was a counter-movement of Chick-fil-A supporters who purposefully spent their money there. And yet. The decade-plus of sustained pressure did eventually push the company to pull its donations from the most overtly anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.4

So do boycotts work? It depends on what we mean by “work.” Will my individual choice to stop buying Chick-fil-A send the company into financial ruin? No. It definitely will not.

But collective, sustained, organized economic pressure, combined with media attention and customer demand, does force companies and institutions to address their choices. Collective action is powerful not because every individual choice moves the needle, but because enough people making the same inconvenient choice, over and over, adds up to something companies can’t ignore.

When I stopped eating at Chick-fil-A in college, I didn’t see any immediate change. But it did help me start to pay attention to where my money goes.

Boycotts are not going to solve the world’s problems. But they are another pillar among the many pillars of trying to live in alignment with what I care about. Purchasing power isn't just about toppling corporations. I like to believe it’s about our agency too.

I know I’m not perfect, and there’s privilege surrounding this issue, but every time we’re spending money, we're casting a small vote for the world we want to live in. The vote doesn't always count the way I might hope. But we still get to cast it.

4

Advocates argue the changes are cosmetic. The cynical part of me thinks they’re right.

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Until next time, take care of yourself, your people, and the patch of earth around you.