That is the question.
With an understandable outrage toward BP’s disastrous oil spill and subsequent cleanup failure, over 250,000 people have joined Facebook’s “Boycott BP” group, and many others have decided to buy their gas elsewhere. People feel helpless in a situation where their countrymen in the Gulf are having their livelihoods (and environment) torn apart and are seeking some way to let BP know how angry they are.
However, some economists and industry experts claim a boycott would do little to hurt BP, as most American BP stations are owned by independent operators and simply sell BP’s gasoline. A BP gas station owner, they explain, is simply a local small business owner and this type of boycott would injure a would-be boycotter’s local economy worse than it would BP.
But what, then, can an average citizen do? It has been suggested that the best thing one can do is to contact one’s Congressional Representative and support legislative efforts to investigate and punish BP’s actions. Is that enough?
I had a similar discussion once about people who boycott Coca-Cola because of its links to human rights abuses in Colombia and throughout Latin America. The person I was speaking with claimed that by refusing to drink Coke and by college students demanding that their school break its contract with Coke, the only one really hurt was the local distributor, who is simply doing his job by delivering a product. But how else can one monetarily pressure the company? There’s no Coke-owned retail outlet to refuse to buy from. Protests in front of Coke’s headquarters won’t resonate throughout the country and the company doesn’t sell its product directly to consumers. Sadly, a middleman is put in place that is injured during a boycott.
BP is a little different, as it does own some of its gas stations in the US. Is it going too far to injure a local business owner in hopes of sending a company a message? Is it legitimate to put someone out of work for your political/social beliefs? Would a failure to boycott BP allow the company to think that people are alright with what they did? Would that incentivize the company to be as reckless in the future as it was in the past?
To boycott or not to boycott? That is the question.
With an understandable outrage toward BP’s disastrous oil spill and subsequent cleanup failure, over 250,000 people have joined Facebook’s “Boycott BP” group, and many others have decided to buy their gas elsewhere. People feel helpless in a situation where their countrymen in the Gulf are having their livelihoods (and environment) torn apart and are seeking some way to let BP know how angry they are.
However, some economists and industry experts claim a boycott would do little to hurt BP, as most American BP stations are owned by independent operators and simply sell BP’s gasoline. A BP gas station owner, they explain, is simply a local small business owner and this type of boycott would injure a would-be boycotter’s local economy worse than it would BP.
But what, then, can an average citizen do? It has been suggested that the best thing one can do is to contact one’s Congressional Representative and support legislative efforts to investigate and punish BP’s actions. Is that enough?
I had a similar discussion once about people who boycott Coca-Cola because of its links to human rights abuses in Colombia and throughout Latin America. The person I was speaking with claimed that by refusing to drink Coke and by college students demanding that their school break its contract with Coke, the only one really hurt was the local distributor, who is simply doing his job by delivering a product. But how else can one monetarily pressure the company? There’s no Coke-owned retail outlet to refuse to buy from. Protests in front of Coke’s headquarters won’t resonate throughout the country and the company doesn’t sell its product directly to consumers. Sadly, a middleman is put in place that is injured during a boycott.
BP is a little different, as it does own some of its gas stations in the US. Is it going too far to injure a local business owner in hopes of sending a company a message? Is it legitimate to put someone out of work for your political/social beliefs? Would a failure to boycott BP allow the company to think that people are alright with what they did? Would that incentivize the company to be as reckless in the future as it was in the past?
To boycott or not to boycott? That is the question.
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