Oh, boycott

David versus Federated Department Stores, Inc.

by Stephen Heuser

I have a confession to make: on Friday, December 17, I walked into the Starbucks a block from my apartment and bought a cup of coffee, ending a personal boycott that had lasted, without interruption, since 1969.

I can't tell you why I broke the boycott, because I can't tell you why I was boycotting Starbucks in the first place. It wasn't a matter of principle. It wasn't about the coffee. I mentioned the end of my Starbucks boycott to a co-worker the other day and was suddenly embarrassed to realize that I couldn't explain, more than three months later, why I'd been diligently avoiding one particular coffee chain all those years.

Sound familiar? I have come to believe there are two types of people: those who have no idea what I'm talking about, and those who have totally irrational personal boycotts of their own. The first group is well-adjusted, healthy, gets things done. The second consists of fussy people, editors, individuals stunted in various ways -- basically, my friends.

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Most thinking people have a love-hate relationship with commercial culture. But some people have more of a dysfunctional marriage with it. Those are the people who conduct personal boycotts.

One woman at my office, for instance, lived in London for 11 years without ever setting foot in Marks & Spencer, a popular department store known as the establishment where every resident of Britain buys his or her underwear. Except my co-worker, who treated the place like it was infected. When I asked her why, she couldn't explain; she was just annoyed that everyone seemed to go there. By the end of her time in the country, even the name Marks & Spencer had begun to irritate her. It was the quintessential personal boycott: baseless, abstract, and harmful only to the boycotter, who is put to great personal inconvenience by having to go somewhere else -- probably somewhere worse -- to buy underwear.

The boycotted institution, of course, couldn't care less.

Starbucks does not give a damn that I personally refused to buy its coffee until last December. The United States Postal Service does not care that my friend Christina, for complex personal reasons, will not post mail in a specific mailbox near Lechmere. And Federated Department Stores, Inc., will never notice that my friend Linda refuses to set foot in the Macy's in Downtown Crossing.

Linda's boycott of Macy's is my favorite personal boycott of all. She avoids Macy's because she believes that particular building "should be Jordan Marsh," as it was until about four years ago. Fair enough, except that Linda had previously been boycotting Jordan Marsh. She thought the merchandise was arranged in an intentionally confusing way. This is the first genuinely ironic boycott I have encountered. I'm sure it's not the only one.

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Most of these obscure boycotts seem to fall into three categories.

1) The loyalty boycott. Cheesy new store replaces favorite old store; cheesy new store must pay the price. I don't go to McDonald's in Kenmore Square, because it supplanted a by-the-slice joint called the Pizza Pad where an employee once treated me nicely. I often think it would be sweet if we could get all the loyalty boycotters of a place together to sign a card for its previous owners, just so they'd know they're remembered, but that would be impossible: the only thing the boycotters have in common is the one place they'd never be caught dead in now.

2) The revenge boycott. My girlfriend tells everyone she knows to avoid one Tex-Mex bar in the Back Bay, because in 1995 the bouncer made a group of women (including her) wait in a line on the street even though there was plenty of room inside. The idea was to attract business: women are lining up to get in here! Most of the women in line probably wrote this off as a typical sleazy bar maneuver, but one of them remains furious to this day, and continues to punish the bar by depriving it of her business, which I would estimate, generously, at one margarita per year.

3) The identity boycott. If I really, really tried to articulate why I never went to Starbucks, I'd have to admit it was because I associate Starbucks with a certain kind of fleece-wearing, Powerbook-using yuppie. Avoiding Starbucks was a way of assuring myself that I wasn't that kind of person, despite the obvious fact that I wore fleece, used a Powerbook, and was otherwise exactly that kind of person. At least I drank bad coffee.

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Do not mistake the personal boycott for the kind of mass movement that performs a sweeping moral good such as saving dolphins or ending exploitation or wiping the smile permanently from the face of Kathie Lee Gifford. That kind of boycott makes sense.

It also involves taking a public stance on something, an idea that is anathema to most of the personal boycotters I know. Take something that seriously, and you might actually get caught up in a movement, and the next thing you know you're being tear-gassed in Seattle.

No, the personal boycott is a lonely and futile thing. As Tolstoy might have said, all happy consumers are the same, but every unhappy consumer is boycotting in his own way. I know one broad-minded, intelligent guy who won't go to stores that don't put change directly into his hand: something I have never even noticed about the stores I visit.

There is a profoundly vain quality about the personal boycott, as though one's little commercial decision really makes a difference. In a sense it is the same vanity that drives democracy -- my vote really matters -- except in this case everyone decides for themselves what they're voting on, and they vote by crumpling up the ballot and stuffing it behind the sink.

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When I first moved to Boston, I began to be deeply irritated by the dippy early-'90s environmentalist bandwagon everyone seemed to be on, a bandwagon that included any number of faux-hippie retailers with the word "planet" in their names. There was Small Planet, and -- ugh -- Placid Planet, among others. A planetary boycott was born.

People made fun of me, but I held my ground. The only exception I made was a used-CD store called Planet Records, which seemed acceptable because it used the word "planet" in a cool retro sense and not a lame neo-hippie sense. (It helped that they had some really good CDs.)

These days, every single one of those Planet stores has closed, which raises an unsettling prospect: what if my boycott actually did affect something? That would be a nightmare. Because the real point of the personal boycott isn't to close down businesses. Macy's will never be Jordan Marsh again, and however badly McDonald's does, the Pizza Pad will never come back. The point is to resist: resist change, resist assimilation, resist the inevitable day when you admit that Starbucks makes pretty good coffee after all, and the class of smug yuppies that goes there includes you.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.