Customers Keep Walking Away and Companies Keep Acting Surprised

Commentary. The first thing that changed wasn't a hashtag. It was the shelf.

In 2023, Modelo Especial passed Bud Light as the best-selling beer in the United States, according to retail scanner data from Circana that ran everywhere from CNBC to the trade press. Bud Light had held that spot for roughly two decades. Anheuser-Busch InBev's own second-quarter 2023 results showed US revenue down about a tenth year over year, and the company said plainly that the drop was tied to the volume decline at Bud Light. No congressional hearing. No legislation. A lot of guys just bought something else.

That's the whole mechanism, and it's why it keeps happening. Nobody had to organize anything.

Walking away isn't a boycott

A boycott is a campaign. It has a spokesman, a hashtag, a press release, and a shelf life of about nine days. Most of them fail, and the people running them know it.

What happened to Bud Light wasn't that. It was a few million people deciding, individually and quietly, that the twelve-pack on the left was fine. Switching costs in packaged beer are approximately zero. Same price, same cooler, four feet to the right. Once the habit breaks, there's no particular reason to switch back, because the new thing tastes the same and nobody's mad at it.

Target ran into the same wall the same spring. After the retailer pulled parts of its 2023 Pride collection from stores following customer complaints and reports of confrontations with staff, it posted a comparable sales decline in its fiscal second quarter of 2023, the first in about six years. Management named guest reaction to the Pride assortment as a factor on the earnings call. That's not a talking point from a critic. That's the company's own disclosure to shareholders.

Here's the part that should interest you more than the outrage cycle did: both companies were operating on a model where the reputational upside of a campaign was assumed and the downside was assumed to be noise. The downside showed up in the comps.

Then came 2024, and the reversals

Between June 2024 and January 2025, the list of large American companies that publicly scaled back diversity, equity and inclusion programs got long enough to stop being news.

Tractor Supply went first, on June 27, 2024, announcing it was eliminating DEI roles, withdrawing from the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, and dropping its carbon emission goals. John Deere followed in July. Harley-Davidson in August. Then Lowe's, then Ford in late August, then Molson Coors in September. Walmart, the largest private employer in the country, announced changes the week of Thanksgiving 2024, including winding down its racial equity center and ending participation in the HRC index. McDonald's announced its own retreat on January 6, 2025. Target ended its Racial Equity Action and Change program on January 24, 2025.

Most of those statements arrived within days of a public pressure campaign, several of them run by Robby Starbuck, who would post a company's internal DEI materials and give it a window to respond. The companies almost never credited him. They almost always announced within the week.

You can believe that's coincidence. I don't.

The honest part, which nobody in my lane likes saying

Consumer pressure doesn't always work, and it doesn't only work in one direction.

Nike put Colin Kaepernick in a national campaign in 2018. There was a hashtag, there were videos of people burning shoes, and the stock hit a record high inside of a month. Sales went up. Nike knew exactly who its customer was and made a bet that the people burning the shoes weren't buying many shoes.

Costco went the other way and won. At its annual meeting on January 23, 2025, shareholders rejected a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research asking the company to report on the risks of its diversity programs. More than 98 percent of votes went against it. The board had recommended a no vote. Costco's membership renewal rates stayed where they've always been, which is absurdly high.

And Target got hit from the other side in 2025, when a Georgia pastor called for a boycott over the company's DEI rollback. So the pressure runs both ways, and a company that flips under fire can end up with two angry customer bases instead of one.

What separates the Bud Light case from the Nike case isn't which side was right. It's whether the product had a substitute the customer liked just as much. Beer does. Warehouse club memberships mostly don't.

What actually moves a company

Not your comment. Not mine. Three things, in order.

Comparable sales. The single number every retail executive is judged on. It strips out new store openings and tells you whether the same stores sold more stuff than last year. When that number goes negative and the CEO has to explain why on a recorded call with analysts, something changes.

The proxy vote. Every public company files a proxy statement, form DEF 14A, before its annual meeting. It lists every shareholder proposal, the board's recommendation, and after the meeting the company files an 8-K with the actual vote counts. All of it is free at SEC.gov's EDGAR database. If you want to know what a company really thinks about an issue, read what the board told its owners to vote, not what the marketing department posted.

The 10-K risk factors. Buried maybe fifteen pages into the annual report, under Item 1A, companies list what could hurt them. Several large retailers now name consumer or political backlash to their social positions as a material risk. They didn't ten years ago. That's an admission written by lawyers who are legally obligated not to be cute about it.

What you can actually do

Pick one, do it properly, and skip the rest.

• Switch and stay switched. A one-week boycott is a rounding error. A permanent habit change is a data point in someone's quarterly deck. The measurement is the thing.
• Tell them why, once, in writing. Investor relations, not customer service. Customer service logs a complaint. IR summarizes sentiment for people who read the comps.
• Read the proxy before the meeting, not the press release after. Ten minutes on EDGAR beats ten hours of commentary.
• If you own the stock, vote it. Most retail shareholders never do. Your broker will let you vote online and it takes about four minutes.
• Don't punish the local store for the corporate office. The manager in your town didn't write the policy and gets fired when the store underperforms.

The companies that got burned in 2023 didn't misjudge their politics. They misjudged their customers, which is a firing offense in retail and a survivable embarrassment in marketing, and that asymmetry explains almost everything about how they behaved afterward.

Make yourself expensive to ignore. Then go buy the other beer.