Holiday shoppers are flexing political power through big boycott campaigns 

This article Holiday shoppers are flexing political power through big boycott campaigns  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

For 38 weeks straight, racial justice protesters have been gathering outside a Target in Washington, D.C. to call out the company for suspending its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, aligning itself with the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI. 

To put additional pressure on the company, those advocates have been calling for “Target fasts,” in which people completely abstain from purchasing anything from Target. 

The boycott began in February, following Target’s suspension of DEI efforts, and was initiated by Until Freedom, a nonprofit organization dedicated to community activism and rapid response. At first, Until Freedom co-founder Tamika Mallory often heard people say that they didn’t feel like they could give up shopping at Target. Now, she said, momentum has picked up — people are happy to be part of the movement and distance themselves from Target completely. 

As the holidays rapidly approach, the Target fasts are one of a number of boycotts in protest of ongoing attacks on marginalized communities. Led by coalitions that support Palestinian liberation, immigrant rights and racial justice, boycotts have reached millions via social media and exercised solidarity with other movements and coalitions to amplify their messages. Several are going beyond social media to put multipronged pressure on companies — through in-person actions like the Target protests or “buy-ins” in which protesters purchase and return items to clog up sales lines. Organizers are also getting more sophisticated in educating consumers to make boycotting easier.  

“I think people are looking for ways that they can express their frustration and pain, and we believe that corporations should not get a pass [to] side with the bigotry coming out of the Trump administration or stay silent while communities are harmed,” Mallory said. “We know our economic power is something that we can use that is actually very influential in the marketplace.”

Black Friday and beyond

During the long weekend of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the bonanza shopping days after Thanksgiving, Until Freedom worked with a coalition of more than 300 social justice organizations to boycott corporations that have rolled back DEI policies or supported federal immigration raids. In addition to Target, that campaign, called “We Ain’t Buying It,” took aim at Home Depot — which advocates say has been complicit in the kidnappings of day laborers by federal immigration agents — and Amazon, which has funded Trump and his administration through donations and discounted government contracts (including with Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

“The campaign became an effort that has many different advocates engaged under one umbrella, and that umbrella was to ensure that we begin to flex that muscle of using our economic power as our voice,” Mallory said.

Separately, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement launched a holiday protest campaign on Black Friday. For BDS, the boycott is a familiar tactic: Since 2005, the movement has been calling upon people and organizations all over the world to sever ties with companies that support Israel, taking inspiration from how the international boycott movement against South Africa contributed to the end of apartheid in 1994.The BDS movement takes credit for getting corporations like G4S, Puma and Pillsbury to cut ties with Israel, and its efforts and impact have intensified since the genocide in Gaza began in October 2023. For example, the BDS movement began targeting McDonald’s last year when the fast food chain provided the Israeli occupation forces with meals during the genocide. Last February, McDonald’s CEO admitted the boycott was having a “meaningful business impact,” and the company’s stock subsequently dipped by $7 billion.

This holiday season, the BDS movement is focusing on McDonald’s and 11 other priority targets who make giftable products and whose technology and services have enabled Israel’s ongoing genocide:

• Xbox, whose parent company Microsoft provides Israel with technology like artificial intelligence that has been used in the genocide and to uphold a regime of apartheid
• Amazon and HP, which provides computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence and other technology services to the Israeli government and the Israeli military. 
• Dell and Intel, which have invested in Israel
• Reebok, which sponsors the Israel Football Association
• ZARA, which opened stores in Israel during the genocide
• Disney+, which promotes actors like Shira Haas and Gal Gadot who have done PR campaigns to help burnish Israel’s image during the genocide
• Sodastream, which displaced Palestinians in the Naqab (Negev) region to build a factory.
• Carrefour, which has a partnership with Israeli start-ups on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity
• Coca-Cola, which operates a regional distribution center in the occupied West Bank during the genocide 

While the holiday boycott campaigns have reached millions on social media, neither the BDS movement nor Until Freedom could comment yet on how they impacted Black Friday sales. “We can sometimes hear about how a boycott campaign has impacted the profits of a corporation when they have quarterly earnings reports or annual shareholder meetings,” said Olivia Katbi, North America coordinator for the BDS movement. But boycotts are often a long game, she added. “Even if a specific day of action doesn’t directly or immediately impact profits, we see long-term effects through spreading awareness of a campaign and impacting the reputation of the corporation.”

BDS solidarity efforts

For Katbi, the holiday spirit is one of solidarity. “This holiday season, Palestinians are asking for meaningful solidarity as they endure Israel’s illegal occupation and Palestinians in Gaza face ongoing genocide despite the so-called ceasefire,” she said. “We must escalate pressure and peacefully disrupt all forms of complicity to contribute to ending Israel’s unspeakable genocide and to dismantling its regime of settler-colonial apartheid.”

Several groups have stepped up to join the BDS movement in that fight. Christians for a Free Palestine and the BDS movement called for protests during the Advent season leading up to Christmas, during which advocates will hold pickets at Chevron stations and engage in caroling “with a twist.” The book of carols includes “We wish you would boycott Chevron” (to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,”) with verses like:

Good tidings we bring
For Gaza we sing
Don’t profit from war crimes
So switch the franchise.

Chevron is the largest producer of natural gas for Israel and the largest multinational corporation with a significant stake in Israel’s energy sector. The campaign also includes petition deliveries, rallies, emailing or calling Chevron, signing and sharing pledges, and leaving comments about the boycott on Chevron’s social media accounts. 

Earlier this month, a group of game workers and activists joined the boycott of Xbox by launching a campaign called “No Games for Genocide.” One video game developer has already pulled its game from the Xbox Store, saying: “We call on others in our community to do whatever they can to fight this historic injustice.” 

When Ahmed Bashbash, a Palestinian from Gaza now living in Budapest, first started getting involved in boycotts, he would screenshot and save posts from the BDS movement so he could memorize which companies to abstain from. When his brother died in Gaza in October 2023, Bashbash wanted to do something more to honor his memory, so the following month he created an app called “No Thanks” to make it easier to figure out who to boycott. The app lets people scan an item to see if the company that made it is on the boycott list.

Bashbash originally intended for the app to be used among friends, but it went viral and has become a tool for the Palestinian solidarity movement worldwide, with 13 million downloads. At first, Bashbash did his own research to find companies to add, but now he has a team of volunteers to help him.

“The boycott is one of our tools as normal people around the world, because we are not governments, we are not people in power to be able to stop these things,” Bashbash said. “What we can participate in is to boycott the companies and products and governments behind this genocide and all of this occupation.”

ICE boycotts

Immigrant justice advocates are similarly grappling with how ordinary people can find ways to protect their vulnerable communities. In Southern California and elsewhere, one of the ways this has manifested is an ongoing Boycott Home Depot campaign. 

Since the summer, Home Depot has been a frequent site of federal immigration round-ups in which day laborers are targeted and kidnapped by masked agents. Palmira Figueroa of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, or NDLON, said it is important to put pressure on the company to actively oppose the raids.

“We’re calling the corporation to speak up about the abuses happening right outside the stores and sometimes inside, and to take a stand on saying that what is happening should not be happening because it puts everyone at risk, not only immigrants,” Figueroa said.

As part of the campaign, advocates protest outside of Home Depot stores, use social media and rallies to educate consumers about how the company is complicit in ICE raids and kidnappings, and engage in buy-ins to disrupt sales. 

In late November, outside of a Home Depot in Monrovia, California where a man was killed trying to escape an ICE raid, NDLON and other advocates held a buy-in: where more than a hundred people bought and returned ice scrapers from Home Depot to disrupt sales. After that, NDLON held a national call on which 800 people signed up to learn how to do buy-ins so they could replicate them in their own campaigns.

“It’s nonviolent escalation that comes from the pain and the separation of families and the hurt that our families are feeling,” Figueroa said.

John Parker, coordinator at the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice and a member of the steering committee for the Boycott Home Depot campaign — a coalition of more than 80 organizations — said that some of the Home Depot protests have been successful in closing down stores for the day. The boycotts are spreading as people learn about them through videos on social media and passersby see the protests and take an interest in the campaigns, he said. He is seeing more people upset with the facism from the Trump administration and wanting to do something about it.

“It’s a good way to try to build empowerment for the working class,” Parker said. He hopes the boycotts will keep growing. Eventually he would like to see them turn into a movement to shut down ports in Los Angeles in solidarity with Palestine. 

“Our biggest, most powerful weapon is solidarity,” Parker said.

This article Holiday shoppers are flexing political power through big boycott campaigns  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/12/holiday-boycott-campaigns/