So, as someone who cooks, I have been taking an interest in the story of Penzey’s Spices. They’re a small business based in Wisconsin and they sell specialty spices to people who are into cooking enough that they get into that sort of thing. Right after the election, Penzey’s apparently sent out an email opposing the “open embrace of racism by the Repubulican Party in this election” and deploring the probable consequences. When this provoked quite the response, they followed up with Cooking Trumps Racism, in which the owners clarified that they did not hold ALL Republicans responsible for this, just those who had voted for Trump. For those who did, they had this to say:
“For the rest of you, you just voted for an openly racist candidate for the presidency of the United States of America. In your defense, most of you did so without thinking of the consequences of your candidate’s racism because, for most of you the heartbreaking destruction racism causes has never been anything you or your loved ones have had to experience. But the thing is elections have their consequences. This is no longer sixty years ago. Whether any of us like it or not, for the next four years the 80% of this country who did not just vote for an openly racist candidate are going to treat you like you are the kind of person who would vote for an openly racist candidate.”
This of course provoked backlash, hate mail, calls to boycott Penzey’s, etc. from Trump Nation. The other day, Penzey’s published an open letter to other CEOs about their ordeal. The summary: Since taking a public stance against the normalization of racism during the 2016 election, “online sales are up 59.9%, gift box sales up 135%.”
Below the cut tag I’m going to talk about some other examples of this, some smaller scale and some larger, all of which go to make the point that although Trump Nation may have Twitter, its citizens evidently do not like to put their money where their anonymous trolling is.
This should really go in the schadenfreude file, but it is also proof that though the wielding of the wallets works slowly, it gets there in the end:
Ivanka Trump Shuts Down her Namesake Clothing Brand
“The closure comes as a surprise even within the company, which has 18 employees. As recently as last week, officials had been discussing the implementation of long-delayed oversight of its foreign factory partners.”
Ivanka Daughter of Buttercup claims she did this so she can “focus on her work in Washington.” As nobody can figure out what the hell it is that she actually does in Washington, I’m going to attribute this decision to other factors liiiiiike…
“The announcement comes less than two weeks after Canadian department store chain Hudson’s Bay Co. said it would remove all Ivanka Trump products from its website and 90 stores because of the brand’s “performance.”’
Yes, that’s right. I’m going to blame Canada. And by “blame” I mean “thank.”
BUT…this is the ultimate result of a boycotting of the Trump brand(s) that was undertaken right after the election and is apparently FINALLY starting to bite:
“The company’s name has come down off of hotels in Toronto, Panama and New York’s Soho neighborhood, as well as from some residential buildings in New York.
While the Trump Hotel in D.C. charges some of the highest rates in the city and has become a popular meeting place for Republican political groups, religious organizations and businesses, data on other Trump properties including the Mar-a-Lago resort show signs of price drops as sports teams and charities move their business elsewhere.
Sales data on Trump-branded condominiums in New York City show them attracting lower prices than competing properties since Trump entered office. Meanwhile, the Trump Organization’s plans to dramatically expand its hotel portfolio in the U.S. have failed to progress, having opened no hotels under its announced ‘Scion’ and ‘American Idea’ brands.”
Do I care that much about Ivanka Trump’s clothing line? No. But this is an example of how sustained pressure can work. Boycotting Ivanka’s clothing line isn’t something a whole lot of people were passionate about; and yet, ‘declining sales’ has killed it off anyway.
I had to go all the way back to December 2016 to find this post; and looking over the archive was interesting. Indivisible did not exist then. Other wallet-wielding activity at that time included: donating buckets of money to the ACLU which has since been in the trenches on the travel ban as well as family separation; subscribing to newspapers which have since done major investigative reporting; donating to Democratic candidates that have since won special elections. This shit does not provide *immediate* gratification but it does eventually work. RAICES, which is working to fight Buttercup immigration ‘policy’ and reunite families, took in a huge amount of money in the first couple weeks of the crisis, and I mean HUGE. Buttercup is not the only one remaking the landscape. We’ve been doing it too. And right now, the results are modest; but if we keep it up, they will grow.
The Wielding Of The Wallets
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