After just a couple of days, right-wingers are already declaring victory in a war against Ben & Jerry's. Here's the story, from the New York Post:
Ben & Jerry’s parent company has lost nearly $2 billion in market cap amid calls to boycott the Vermont-based ice cream maker over a July 4 tweet condemning the US for existing on “stolen Indigenous land.”So you're saying the stock dropped 1.3% in two days -- as stocks often do? And you're taking all the credit for that? You're sure the drop is entirely unrelated to the same market forces that caused the stock to drop 10%, from $55.56 on May 5 to 49.97 on May 30, well before the message from Ben & Jerry's that got the right all worked up?
Shares of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch multinational firm, slid 0.8% Thursday after closing down 0.5% the previous day....
The company’s stock price has closed Thursday at $51.31, nearly $1 below its closing price of $52.28 during Monday’s shortened trading — and the day before Ben & Jerry’s posted its unpatriotic tweet.
The result has seen its market cap drop to $128.5 billion from $130.2 billion on Monday.
And this $2 billion loss is for a company with a market cap of $128.75 billion. So it's not a huge hit. Ben & Jerry's (2022 revenue: $910.68 million) is only a small part of Unilever (2022 revenue: $63.293 billion).
Here's why a Ben & Jerry's boycott won't have the same impact as a boycott of Bud Light: The core market for Bud Light is blue-collar men. That's not true for Ben & Jerry's. What got right-wingers upset about Bud Light was a marketing effort that touched on gender and masculinity. Of course it drove right-wing blue-collar men absolutely berserk. They may care about defending white people's treatment of indigenous Americans, but not the way they care about defending star-spangled American heterosexual manhood and its sacred link to lousy domestic beer.
I might be wrong again. But I'm guessing that the truly successful wingnut boycotts will all be based on gender panic.
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