this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
928 points (94.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
593 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, this line of thinking is wrong, I wish people would stop saying this. Voting with your wallet never works when 1% has >50% of wealth. It’s easier for 5% of people (wealthy, top execs) to agree on milking the rest than 95% of people to agree on boycotting a certain brand. That’s why we have regulations, we wouldn’t need them if “voting with wallets” actually worked.
Free market capitalism got us to this point, it cannot take us out of this.
1% might have 50% of the wealth, they do not account for 50% of the spending. Especially not at Taco Bell.
Pure capitalism is broken af, but companies like this will feel it if 10% of costumers stops going there. The increase in price can recover some of it, but only to a certain extent. It's a simple supply and demand issue.
That being said, I'm not from the US, so take my opinion on local issues with a grain of salth. And I definitely don't mean to imply that wealth inequality is not an issue. On the contrary.
You mean well and I wish you were right, but capitalism proves you wrong time and time again. Remember when everyone cancelled their Netflix subscriptions and the company went bankrupt because they disallowed account sharing? Yeah, that was the sentiment on all social media.
Nobody did that in net change numbers.
If your theory was right, Netflix is succeeding because Saudi billionaires from the 1% bought up thousands of Netflix subscriptions to make up for the average Joe from the 99% that unsubscribed.
What really happened was that when they added household restrictions they saw a net increase in subscriptions, not from the 1%, but from the 99%.
While the concentration of wealth has significant effects on opportunity and access to capital, it means pretty much jack shit to access to revenue, which is dictated by mass spending and very susceptible to voting with your dollar.
We literally just saw a company hit hard by people voting with their dollar, with one of the largest alcoholic beverage companies taking a significant loss because they pissed off two sides of the market with their behavior, with effects still going on today.
No, it proves me right. People are still willing to pay for the service despite the price hike. So it must mean that people think this non-essential service, for which there are alternatives, is worth the money.
Unfortunately, this is users allowing for this kind of behaviour.
The original comment was that voting with your wallet doesn't work. I'm saying that it's a problem with enough people voting with their wallet. If you are the only person that cares about something and stop buying from a particular company, they will not even notice it.
On the other hand, look what happened when bud light had this thing with a trans influencer and conservatives got ridiculously upset with this, as they do. ABInbev is still feeling the effects of that.