My own take is that if you have a boycott, to have political impact, it needs to have concrete goals and agreed-upon-in-advance, well-defined termination conditions.

Without that, you’re flailing around angrily. Doesn’t actually do anything, since it’s not as if any one party can do anything you want that has an effect in response.

I’d also add that the broader a boycott, the harder it is to do, and the more-diffuse the effect. If you don’t buy anything, you’re affecting all sorts of people. Many of those have no impact on your particular concerns.

If I were going to participate in a boycott:

• It would not have termination condition defined by time, but in achieving political goals. Defining a termination in time specifically says “I’m not going to have an effect after this point”, which encourages ignoring the boycott, and and not having concrete political goals says “nothing you do for me is going to affect what I do anyway”, which also encourages ignoring the boycott.

• Those goals would be achievable, concrete, and announced in advance.

• It would identify specific parties who have the authority to produce the change I want and target those.

• It would be limited in scope to try to affect specifically the parties who I want to act differently. Anything else, and you’re expending will-to-act on impacting others and also antagonizing people whose actions you don’t care about.

EDIT: What would I consider to be a more-effective boycott? The article says that one thing that people are upset about is Target rolling back DEI policy. Okay. Say “we will boycott Target until it reinstates the DEI policy that existed prior to Date X” (or, hell, adopts some other policy, whatever). That is something that Target management can very clearly institute. It has concrete political goals. It does not announce in advance that it is going to terminate at a given time. It is not impacting other parties who have nothing to do with whatever someone is upset about. The impact of the boycott is focused on the party in question.

Then repeat that with other parties if you have other things you want to accomplish.

That’s also sustainable. It is very likely that you can keep doing that for a sustained period of time, because Target probably doesn’t have a monopoly as a provider of household goods. There, a boycotter actually has leverage. Trying to boycott…everything…is trying to start a fight with everyone. You can get something from a different store than Target for a lot longer than you can not get anything at all.

I think that just saying “I’m going to not buy anything from anyone for a day because I’m unhappy about various undefined things” is probably not going to accomplish a lot other than maybe letting people work off a little steam. I don’t expect that it will result in change.