Corporations Pretend to Commit Suicide

You are not their customers

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Back in 2013 when A&E fired Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson for expressing the Christian viewpoint on homosexuality during a GQ interview, I had a rather frustrating conversation with my friends on Facebook. Many couldn’t understand why A&E would hobble such a popular and money-making show like Duck Dynasty. Why intentionally kill such a golden-egg-laying goose?

My frustration came from my inability to get through to some: that a corporation exists for one reason - to please its shareholders. Some of my friends couldn’t get their heads around the fact that the consumers are not the primary group to please. On the contrary, the consumers exist in order to do the thing which usually is the goal of the shareholders: to put money into the shareholders’ bank accounts.

Back when this happened, I asked this question. What if, in the case of Duck Dynasty, A&E’s shareholders had a goal other than making money, one which, perhaps, overrode profit? Of course, no one - including me - had an answer. 

Due to the public uproar, A&E rescinded its decision and Duck Dynasty ran for four more years. Perhaps the shareholders decided that money was more important than ideology. Or perhaps there was no system in place to ensure that shareholders would not lose money if they were to fire a popular character for his/her explicit stance on Christianity - at least not in 2013.

From old blog-friend Don Surber:

Bud Light was a stagnant brand, which is why the brand reached out to Dylan Mulvaney [a transgender person] to gin up sales. The day the story broke, I knew the whole Budweiser brand (and maybe Busch) was in trouble. The CEO did not. Instead of firing his marketer and apologizing profusely, he did nothing for a month.

This weekend the New York Post reported, “Bud Light, which has been displaced as the nation’s top-selling beer following the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, is in danger of falling farther behind its rivals when retailers reset shelf space this fall.

“Wholesalers, industry experts, and a former Anheuser-Busch executive told ABC News on Friday that Bud Light could lose refrigerator space at retailers such as Walmart and 7-Eleven.”

[SNIP]

National Review reported, “The soap brand Dove is facing calls for a boycott after a controversial Black Lives Matter activist revealed she is partnering with the beauty brand as an ambassador to promote fat liberation.

“The activist, Zyahna Bryant, made headlines in 2020 for her efforts to get a white University of Virginia student expelled for making what Bryant deemed to be threatening comments about a group of Black Lives Matter protesters. She later acknowledged that she likely misheard the student — but not before campaigning to get her suspended from campus.

“Bryant revealed on Instagram late last month that she is partnering with Dove.”

Ms. Bryant appears to weigh at least 350 lbs.

Don and many others are calling these decisions stupid and, on the face of things, stupidity is a mild word.

But what if the shareholders are acting according to an unseen rule book in order to access a source of funding other than the consumer? Again, what if they have a goal other than making money from the consumer?

As was so with Bud Light, the boycotts on Dove soap geared up quickly.¹ And that is the goal of these types of corporate decisions - to give evidence (a boycott by the rabble) of allegiance to Environmental, Social, & Governance  (ESG) and to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI). These programs may have been in place back in 2013, but they didn’t have teeth, whatever that entails. Now they do.

An underlying intention is to implement the Coconut Treatment; to scrape out the objective definitions of “woman,” “fat,” “beauty,” etc. and to insert definitions of the Organized Elite’s choosing on any given day.

Here’s what I think: however much money the shareholders of these corporations lose due to boycotts, they will be equally compensated by unseen sources of money.

So, perhaps, they do not have a separate goal, but a separate source.

Sounds crazy, no? Maybe not so much since the events of the last three years.

1. Personal note: I’m allergic to almost all commercially popular soaps. Dove is the exception, but I haven’t used it in a while either. I use Purpose and Dr. Bronner’s peppermint.