Putting money where your mouth is

Mark Morford is suggesting that blue voters express themselves in the way that the red party understands - with their money. So when the going gets blue, the blue go shopping - but only at stores that donated more money to those blue people than those red people. To assist in this goal he points us to Choose The Blue which lists the campaign donations of various corporations under helpful consumer categories like groceries, household and automotic. Buy Blue also has a similar, albeit shorted list, and conveniently sells a bunch of T-shirts to publicize the buy blue campaign.

I'm inclined to agree that putting your consumer dollars where your mouth is can have an effect - corporations are legally obliged to do whatever it is they need to do to preserve shareholder value. If they believe that supporting one party of the other is in their best financial interests then they will - just as Sinclair Broadcasting did. If it can be shown that by doing so they will loose a significant market share and hence revenue and hence stock price then they may find themselves obliged to think again before dabbling in politics. However be warned, this is a quid-pro-quo situation and if blue voters end up shopping only at blue supporting businesses then pretty quickly all the red voters will do the same at their red stores. Since there are arguably more and wealthier red voters at present (if election results are to be believed) then they will win that fight. Once again corporations will argue that while the consumer base is spending with a political motive it is financially best off focusing on the red spenders. That necessarily limits them to about half of the market by people, but not by dollars...

The Buy Blue people make the argument that it will be good for the market to discover there is plenty of room for "blue alternative" stores to corner the market of those who only want to support "blue leaning" corporations. They say that workers will find such businesses better to work at, shoppers will find the workers happier, and communities will reap benefits all around from having more blue stores and fewer red ones. Its a fine theory - I'll sit back and see what happens, if anything. Not shopping at Amazon and Albertsons (a union store) will be hard to accomplish on a day to day basis - as will only buying gas from Shell. Making my next car a Toyota wont be so hard - my previous comments about Toyota and suining California withstanding, as for staying away from Wal-Mart - a piece of cake!