Sometimes, drawing attention to something (even if it’s negative attention) isn’t he best idea. Think about it like this: When you were a kid and your parents told you not to do something, didn’t that make you really want to do it? They would tell you to stop jumping on the bed. Therefore, all you wanted to do was jump on the bed, right? Even if you weren’t thinking about it before, now it seemed like the greatest activity in the history of the universe. “I must jump on the bed just to spite them,” you thought.
If you believe this attitude changes as an adult, you’re wrong. And even if you aren’t the one jumping on the bed, there’s a whole cadre of parent-spiters lined up behind you.
So it went in the recent hullabaloo over Trump Wines. Trump branded products have been the target of boycotts at various retailers across the US. The most recent store to face the “wrath” of the anti-Trump coalition is Wegmans Food Markets. The Prince William County chapter of the National Organization for Women called for a boycott of the regional supermarket chain’s Virginia stores because of the sale of wines from Trump Winery. If you didn’t already guess, the winery is owned by the President.
The group planned to boycott the supermarket chain if Wegmans didn’t remove the wine from its stores. “Certainly if Wegmans is carrying Trump wines, I personally will not shop there,” Terry O’Neill, president of NOW told the Washington Post last week.
And then….
https://twitter.com/Will_Estrada/status/833390045356769282
Wegmans, which sells five different Trump Wines (Trump Blanc de Blanc, Trump Chardonnay and others) didn’t fold to consumer pressure. The company decided to let shoppers decide if they should carry the wine. Well, the people have spoken. Not only did the boycott not negatively affect the sale of the wine, it actually sold out in most of the 10 Virginia stores.
“Our role as a retailer is to offer choice to our customers,” Wegmans Vice President of Media Relations Jo Natale told The Richmond Times-Dispatch. “For various reasons, we are sometimes asked to stop selling a product. Our response is always the same, no matter the product: How a product performs is our single measure for what stays on our shelves and what goes. Individual shoppers who feel strongly about an issue can demonstrate their convictions by refusing to buy a product.”
Um… okay, that probably has some limits but we get what they’re trying to say.
It just goes to show that sometimes drawing attention to something you don’t like isn’t always such a great idea. When you tell people not to do something, they tend to want to do it (or the MAGA lovers decide to spite the liberals, which is their constitutional right).
