An Office Depot Counter-Argument: Why a Boycott Is Sometimes a Good Thing

As a general rule, I said, I am an opponent of the “Boycott!” threat that pops up so regularly on social media. I think that the “Boycott Them!” meme, like its more reckless cousin the “Sue Them!” meme, is (a) a waste of effort, and (b) ineffective, and (c) paints a very negative, whiny picture of Christians or whatever special interest group is throwing rocks at any particular time.

I’ve watched as some folks disagreed with me on Facebook and social media, chatting among themselves about how “they’ll never go back to that store” or how Office Depot’s capitulation to public pressure is “too little, too late.” And when my own son presented the opposite viewpoint eloquently in an essay, I agreed to publish a counterargument. So here goes! Choose your side in the combox.

WHY A BOYCOTT IS A GOOD THING

A Guest Post

by Jeffrey Schiffer

I disagree.

I’ve been following the saga of the Office Depot print job this week. I’ve read countless variations of the argument that it’s comparable to everything from Christian bakers to county clerks to Hobby Lobby and, so far, in each case, I disagree.

Most recently, I read Kathy Schiffer’s blog post at Patheos where she suggests that a boycott is undesirable and of little use, which is entirely untrue. I also read Elizabeth Scalia’s entry at Aleteia which suggests that the fundamental right to follow one’s conscience should not result in the loss of one’s business and livelihood, and that holding Office Depot’s feet to the fire in the manner in which Maria Goldstein and the Thomas More Society have is an argument for forced cake-baking as we know it. Neither of those things is necessarily true, either.

What I’d suggest is that as freedom-loving people, religious and otherwise, we couldn’t hope for a better outcome than the one we got. Time and again, under similar circumstances and in the absence of government interference, poor business decisions are self-correcting. The more often this takes place absent the threat of force, the freer we remain to make choices for ourselves, and the freer we become to do so in the future, as the Office Depots of the world adapt to meet the needs of customers buying school supplies, rather than the demands of short-sighted legislatures buying votes.

That’s the thing about a boycott. If it’s an issue that’s as important to so many people as this one clearly is, then a boycott works every. single. time. In the case of Office Depot, there likely wasn’t enough time for the impact of a boycott to be felt before they ran far and fast from their original policy on the momentum of a massive surge of bad press and thousands of comments to their Facebook page which, if you haven’t visited yet, is something to behold. If you thought that the threat of a lawsuit was what prompted the policy “clarification”, I’d imagine thousands of social media users would say otherwise. At the time of this writing, Office Depot is still trending on Facebook.

Had they led with an anti-religion policy, it’s not likely that Office Depot would have become the corporate behemoth that they are today, and rightly so. True freedom would allow them to exist, despite an unpopular viewpoint, with no barriers to entry. Their “punishment” for acting according to their conscience, in this case, would likely be the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of market share over the years they’ve been in business as they catered to a select group of people who agreed with their views and alienated many (or most) others. If their views were so extreme that they alienated too many people to continue doing business profitably, then of course they deserve to lose their livelihood over a matter of conscience. That is precisely the point of freedom of association. When the value of a service you provide stops being worth more to me than the value of my conscientious objection to your bigotry (plus my money), then I’m no longer your customer.

Again and again lately, rather than concede that someone we disagree with can place a higher value on matters of conscience than the income they forfeit and can function in a business capacity to serve only the five people who agree with them, we seek to initiate force, through government action, to stop them from thinking those thoughts or to make them disappear from the landscape entirely. We beg for the legislation of morality…right up until it’s not our morals that are being legislated.

From my reading of the Thomas More Society’s letter to Office Depot, there’s a distinction to be made between this case and what we’ve seen before, in that they’ve established Office Depot’s corporate position without seeking to punish them for it, at least not through the threat of government action. What they’ve done, fairly successfully it seems, is to enable Office Depot customers to make future purchasing decisions with all the facts. Taking the knowledge she had of an objectionable policy and quietly slinking off to another print shop is what one does when one assumes that the important battles for freedom are fought in the government, over control of the government, rather than daily, for control of the marketplace. I’d imagine that, in the future, Maria Goldstein will find another way to get her printing done, but in the short term, she’s made a significant case for freedom and against the need for government intervention into all things. That’s not a small victory.

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 Jeffrey L. Schiffer is an architect and entrepreneur in Greenville, South Carolina. Visit his website here.