Vote With Your Wallet

And with your brokerage account

If we have a minuscule amount of agency in our lives these days, it’s in how we spend our money. If you know that the company owning the store where you buy groceries is a major contributor to a political party or PAC whose policies work against you, you could choose to spend your grocery money elsewhere. You’d just need an easy way to know what companies do what deeds for good or ill.

And then, if you’re lucky enough to have a brokerage account, you could go through it and sell off every company whose products and politics offend you.

As it happens, there are easy ways to learn these things. There are some apps that have been developed to give you the straights.

One such app is called Vote With Your Wallet. VWYW says “VWYW is a crowdsourced, peer reviewed database of social responsibility scores for retailers and brands, including: DEI: Do they implement Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies?
Unions and Labor: Do they support or discourage unions and labor protections for their employees?

Another is Voter Wallet, sponsored by Friends of the Movement. They say “The Voter Wallet is a game-changing tool that allows you to vote with your dollars every day, anytime, and anywhere. It’s a platform designed to make conscious spending easy and accessible for everyone. .. Users can swiftly identify merchants aligned with their values, transact, advocate for others to join, and monitor their engagement through the ticker.”

A third is named Goods Unite Us. Their website invites you to ask “What are the politics of your favorite companies?” They provide a field for you to fill in. Let’s say you Walmart. Here you go: Walmart contributed 49% to Democrats, 51% to Republicans, and you can look at the top recipients of donations.

And there are websites like Latino Freeze that provide lists of companies that do and don’t support DEI.

Do consumer “buycotts” have any impact?

For dropping Jimmy Kimmel for a week, Disney+ lost between $3.8 billion and $5 billion in market value due to the backlash and subscription cancellations. The loss stemmed from investor concern over potential subscriber churn on Disney+ and Hulu, leading to the stock price drop in the days after Kimmel was “suspended indefinitely.” Disney’s stock price fell, wiping approximately $3.8 billion to $5 billion from the company’s market value.

The Washington Post lost 75,000 digital subscriptions after its owner, Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos, said its opinion section would exclusively align with libertarian priorities. Prior to this, the newspaper reportedly lost 250,000 readers — or 10% of its customer base — after Bezos blocked its editorial board from publishing an endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris.

So you can take it from there.