Boycotting Stupidity... (Sometimes a Kiss is just a Kiss)

A few people have started a price inspired boycott against a heavyweight food manufacturing Company hoping to force them to lower the cost of their goods as the boycotters are claiming that the price of raw materials have gone down so the end of line product should naturally as well. As I am not au courant with the industry I found myself initially loathe to offer an opinion, but when I noticed that it was targeting one brand in one company I knew that it was destined to fail.

Why? 

Let's say from a totally hypothetical position we assume for the sake of argument that the item in question was bread, and that due to the decreases in world prices of flour as a commodity one would expect these savings to be passed straight on to the consumer and they weren't. And let us further assume that bread and bakery operators, doubles makers and bake and shark vendors decided to pocket this new windfall as increased profit then we as consumers should naturally refuse to buy what they are selling and would be well within our rights to call on others to boycott all flour based products above a certain price (for example: doubles above three dollars, standard size family loaves above ten dollars and rock cakes above a dollar), but instead of this we focused our energies and contempt on one brand, sort of like outlawing all political Parties simply because the last one failed.

Why this boycott will not get my support is that it is using consumer protection conveniently to target a single brand instead of the industry as a whole and worse, upon further investigation it was learned that the people behind the call are all of one political persuasion, leading to the assumption that there was more in the mortar than just product pricing and that this entire exercise may in fact be political bullying. From an activist's point of view this is most upsetting of all because a boycott is one of the tools of last resort used to protect the greatest number of people from those with economic might and ought not to be used as a frivolous political weapon.

Where we as a people do in fact have economic power is at the point of purchase and this ought to be encouraged, but either shame or false pride keeps us from rejecting what we know to be unfairly priced goods. There is an old saying, rich people stay rich acting poor, while poor people stay poor playing rich and there is much guidance in that statement for all of us. My advice is, if it seems unfair,  reject it. Don't call or wait for back up, you as a consumer reject it as quietly or as loudly as you choose, but reject it so that the seller gets the message - If it is too high, we will not buy.

There seems to be a level of 'vested investors' between the electorate and those elected to govern who have more than an ear or access and whose direct lobbying tends to skew governance their way regardless of who is in power and here lies one of the major problems where consumer protection is concerned. This needs to be broken and dispensed with in quick time if real change is going to come and this is an ideal place for real activists to use their power. If the people who do the shoddy roads that are constantly in need of further repair are the same ones who get the contracts again regardless of which side is in Office, tell me what motivation is there for the standards to increase?


Entrenched political noise and polarized rabble rousing have replaced constructive discourse with one side throwing manure, the other side throwing gobar and neither side realizing that they're all throwing the same thing with both sides equally fervent in defense of their side's right to abuse.

If the government refuses to plant fruit and vegetable trees on idle state land to help the environment and lower the price of produce we need to make noise.  The big importer consortium and their influence on successive governments have local produce scarce and expensive and THIS should be an issue for boycott. We need to encourage our people to plant gardens where they live and live off of what they grow. Instead, we are cutting down breadfruit and 'zaboca' and planting ficus like we could eat ficus, victims of our own stupidity. Mangoes are currently more expensive than apples because we not sensible enough to plant our own fruit trees and wasting valuable foreign exchange eating 'B' and 'C' classed foreign fruits.

It is well beyond time that we as a people arrived at an identity that we could respect and this boycott could be harnessed and used as a springboard to channel passion to sensible intention. We need to support each other in the small boycotts, the little acts of economic defiance where price gouging and unscrupulous business practices are concerned, and when one rejects we all reject and not just wait on the next place in line.

Being mindless consumers has turned us into lemmings for big business, removed our sense of self preservation and dumbed down our economic common sense. It is here we ought to refocus our energies and our passion, on empowering and supporting each other in making sensible decisions with every purchase and not just where fashionable boycotts and fads are concerned. It is not too late for our combined actions to raise the level of public participation and a great place to start is by boycotting stupidity. 


Who knows, maybe then common sense will come back in style.