The aftermath of the February 28th retail boycott

February 2025

The title here is a type of pun on math   and how reporters spin the numbers to fit their agenda. It's a kind of nod to the idea lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Trying to make a boycott take off

On February 26, 2025, Betty Lin-Fisher, a consumer reporter at USA Today plugged the article she wrote for the outlet on LinkedIn thus:

This Friday, Feb. 28 is the one-day, 24-hour consumer economic blackout.

Consumers are encouraged not to spend money during the 24-hour period and if you need something, to buy local.
The Feb. 28 event is one of several boycotts planned by groups of consumers or activists to protest what they call corporate greed, companies that have rolled back their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and President Donald Trump's efforts to eliminate federal DEI programs since taking office.

 The Boomerang Effect Shown on Social Media

The comments showed that not everyone agreed with this approach, with many declaring that they'd make a point of shopping that Friday. Some added additional commentary on why they thought this was wrong. 

For example, Kimberly wrote this: 

I will go to Target and look for products by black businesses and purchase some. I disagree with this whole thing as it could affect those that have nothing to do with it. Treat people on merit and qualifications not race. Last I saw we've had a black President, VP, police chiefs, mayor's, governors I could go on and on into infinity. You can be anything you want to
be. Only one standing in your way is yourself.And Jan wrote:We should agree to disagree and give the current administration 2 full years to show American just what they will do for us. I may not have liked prior Presidents but I never wished harm on our working people. After 2 years, THEN speak up and change things with the Mid-Terms. However, I believe we will see our economy turn around over the next 6 months and no one will want to change anything! It's only been 5-6 weeks...... Wish for the BEST for our Country! We the People have spoken with our votes

What does the data show?

Now that we're in early March, the numbers should be in to let us know if the boycott had any significant impact. So let's see what Betsy Lin-Fisher had to say in her follow-up  on the first day of what  was intended to be a one week "fast" from Amazon purchases and a full 40 day "fast" (the correspondence with Ramadan has to be deliberate, as Lent only began today -- Ash Wednesday) intended to harm Target and Walmart in USA Today. 

She was forced to admit that rather than dent Amazon sales, as compared to the previous eight Fridays, sales were actually up 1%, as per Momentum Commerce. It doesn't appear she's getting this information first-hand but relying on Forbes reports, and the headline it used about Amazon on March 2 was Amazon Defies ‘Economic Blackout’ As Sales Climb During Boycott.

Lin-Fisher was willing to concede Amazon so long as she could claim Target. Again, that's based on a Forbes report: Target Loses Web Traffic As Costco Gains On Feb. 28 Economic Blackout Day The implication her is supposed to be that Costco, which did not yet make a statement about dropping DEI, is being rewarded -- as per an increase of 22% in web traffic and 3% in app visits [not sales but visits] --while the other evil retailers are being duly punished by a drop in traffic.

Let's now set aside the question of whether or not Costco benefitted from the boycotters' position, which actually contradicts their stance of avoiding all big retailers and buying locally instead -- and take a closer look at Forbes' figures for Target and Walmart., and I want you to notice something. Hint: it's in the calendar page that I used as the illustration for this blog.   

• On blackout day, Target website visitors dropped 9% compared to Friday, Feb. 14, from 5.2 million to 4.7 million.
• Target app user traffic, representing the most loyal Target customers, was off even more, down 14%, from 4.2 million to 3.5 million.
• On blackout day, the nation’s number one retailer, Walmart, experienced a 5% slump in web traffic, down from 11.7 million on Feb. 14 to 11.2 million and number two Amazon dropped by 2%, from 67.1 million to 65.9 million.

Did you pick up on my hint? Why are we comparing the 28th to the 14th? Wouldn't it make much more sense to compare the 28th to the 21st -- the closest Friday to it and one in which there was no special occasion that prompted people to spend billions of dollars on gifts? 

The NRF predicted a record-breaking $27.5 billion in spending for Valentine's Day 2025

SEe the illustration above of the level fs spending  about the sales predicted for this year's Valentine's Day that would include spending on February 14th itself -- given the last minute habits of many consumers. They would have been able to shop online at retailers like Walmart and Target and still pick up in store to make sure they'd have the expected token of love ready. In fact, a good chunk of Valentine's Day shoppers do make their purchases online as you can see from the graphic below:

 

Deliberately taking February 14th as the baseline to "prove" a significant drop in shopping traffic at Target and Walmart on an ordinary Friday is the equivalent of weighing yourself just after a Thanksgiving dinner and then weighing yourself a few days later first thing in the morning before breakfast and claiming you lost five pounds. Anyone who tracks weight accurately would always tell you to weigh yourself at the same time of day each time for the sake of consistency with your baseline. 

This tactic is known as stacking the deck, one of the logical fallacies you should have learned about it in a rhetoric course. 

Related: 

Everybody lies with visualizations

Ryan George shows best and worst marketing practices

 If you If you are not familiar with Ryan George, then check out his YouTube Channels. Screen Rants, which offers commentary on films in the guise of pitch meetings in which spoilers abound, has nearly 8.5 million subscribers (and millions of views on his take on Spider-Man: No Way Home in which he reveals, among other things, how long it takes to watch five movies to get all the connections in this one).

The  Ryan George channel has 1.38 million subscribers. One of the recent videos on that channel contains fundamental points about the customer's experience. In What Shoppiong on Amazon Feels Like, he nails both best practices and worst practices for effective marketing. 

Best practice: conveying the sponsor message 

The brand paying George for the video is mentioned at the beginning but only very briefly. That means that even if you don't want to sit through an  extended description of the features and benefits SayMine.com boasts of, you will at least have heard of it. 

That's a win-win solution. By placing the more extended description at the end, he's removing the irritation people have from being forced to watch an ad before they get what they want, something that is not likely to make people develop more positive feelings for the brand. 

I touch on the downside of withholding content from your audience in Make your content as accessible as possible.

The brand still gets its spotlight with a brief mention in the beginning and in Ryan George's description of the video. Plus when he delivers the spiel about it, he does so in a kind of tongue-in-cheek manner consistent with the Ryan George brand. He delivers it in the guise of the "adstronaut."

Worst practices: irrelevance, keyword-stuffing descriptions, and information overload

Within the video, the role of Amazon shows an obliviousness to what the shopper wants and needs that highlight the worst practices of pushing products and services on the shopper that are irrelevant to his current needs. He's shopping for a chair and is not interested in video recommendations.

When he finally does get to see chairs, all of them are identical despite showing different brand names with variations on descriptions. Those of us who have shopped on Amazon know this is accurate but just to prove it, I'll put a screenshot from Amazon below:

Compare that with one of the ones in the video:

Content writers, take note! These product descriptions exemplify an SEO strategy that forgets about how the text sounds to  the human reader .

While all that may not overwhelm the shopper, attempting to make sense of the thousands of reviews may do so. That is also not an exaggeration. One of the chairs I checked on the site had over 23.5K ratings. 

Talk about information overload! A few hundred would be more credible and manageable than the huge number of reviews that certain products show on eCommerce sites.

Audiences loved this video because they could so relate as customers. Marketers and online sellers should pay attention because the humor here works because it is true. Turning off shoppers and losing potential customers due to bad practices is no laughing matter. 

Related:

Amazon uses snail mail for direct mail and Seeing stars

Amazon uses snail mail for direct mail

I got mail from Amazon. I don’t mean a package for something I ordered or the usual email marketing marketing message but an honest-to-goodness paper letter that was folded into an envelope and sent to me via the post office. 

So here’s my response:

Dear Amazon Prime Video,

I have received your letter and do appreciate your taking the time to reach out to me, though I do wonder at your inability to match the personalized envelopes with a letter that would address the recipient by name. 

 The real reason I don’t use Prime Video is because there is nothing on there that I would want to see.Let me correct that. There are a few movies that have caught my eye, but they all require another paid subscription on top of Amazon Prime. In other words, they would not be included free with my membership.

As with any business, don’t assume people aren’t using your service simply because they don’t know about. Consider the possibility that your service doesn’t meet their needs or interests.

Thank you,

Ariella Brown

To read my analysis of what Amazon got right, see Dear Amazon Prime Video Team

Related: Ryan George shows best and worst marketing practices

Seeing stars

Not Your Parents' Back-to-School Marketing

pic from https://images.pexels.com/photos/207658/pexels-photo-207658.jpeg?cs=srgb&dl=back-to-school-conceptual-creativity-207658.jpg&fm=jpg

While the heat of summer draws us to the beach, marketing campaigns pull us in another

direction – back-to-school season. Yes, it’s that time of year again, and today’s marketing campaigns must work with the expectations of parents -- and students – to be successful.

The back to school shopping season is a big deal for retailers. The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates the spending for back-to-school shopping to hit $82.8 billion this year. That’s one of the highest on record.

According to a recent JLL Retail survey, low costs and wide selection are important factors to the majority (70 percent) of parents. They favor stores associated with low prices, ranking Walmart (50 percent) and Target (47 percent) among their top picks, and far ahead of Amazon (16 percent). Kids have substantial influence on purchases. More than 57 percent are involved in deciding which store to shop at, and specific items to buy.

Read more in 

Back-to-School Marketing Trends: It's All About Gen Z

Amazon May be Giving a Voice to Marketing

We've seen a rapid evolution in shopping interfaces, ranging from letting our fingers do the walking on our keyboards, to letting them swipe their way to what we seek on touchscreens. The next big thng, it seems, is a touchless interface made by possible by voice-activation.

As people are coming to expect the convenience of talking to their devices, companies like Google and Amazon are accommodating that form of navigation, and exploring new ways to monetize it. 

Read more in Alexa May Give Voice to Targeted Marketing

Seeing stars

As the text below says, this is the second time the writer is contacting me asking me to do him the favor of posting an Amazon review of his book. Notice, he never asks me to read it, and he certainly doesn't offer to send me a copy to make sure I have access to it in order to read it and review it. On the contrary, he says, the favor he requires would take a mere 30 seconds. Now, I'm a fast reader, but not that fast. It would take me at least an hour to read even a very short book, and I believe I have no business reviewing a book I have not read.

Lest you think that I'm misrepresenting the request, I've copied the email in full. In light of this unwitting disclosure, one should add more than the usual number of grains of salt in assessing how accurate the starred reviews are. It's also interesting to see how the author plays into all the persuasive tactics to get someone to feel good about bestowing a favor while in effect playing into a lie.

I could really do with your help Recently I emailed about my attempt to get some reviews for The End of Certainty, on Amazon. The response was incredible and I now have 48 reviews. I really was humbled by the response and can't thank you enough. I do however have one last request. If you weren't able to give me a quick review last time, just pressing the 5 star button would be enough, then please please help out now and do it. Amazon has a rule that it starts promoting books that get at least 50 reviews. As a result I'm tantalizingly close to getting on their list. Just a few more reviews is all I need. Below is the email I sent before, to help jog your memory on all this. The End of Certainty has been doing quite nicely since I published it, and many of the people who've read it have said extremely nice things about it. Over 25,000 people have copies. The success of it has amazed me. However I have a problem and I could really do with your help. It seems the Millennials are all fantastically good at the social media world and as a result they like and review lots of materials. However my audience is people like you. You're older than your average millennial, and as a result don't feel so obliged to get involved in the whole scoring and reviewing stuff. I understand, because frankly, I think the same way. However it's causing me a problem, which I hope you can help me with. To get the Amazon AI  to notice the book, and therefore get it to a wider audience I need to get over 100 reviews. These don't need to be in depth reviews, something as simple as, it was interesting, or simply giving it a star rating is enough. You'd be doing me a huge favor by getting involved. I just need 30 seconds of your time. Because of the odd way Amazon works, US reviews show up in the UK Amazon store, but NOT the other way around. As a result putting the review, or giving it a star rating on the US Amazon Store would make a huge difference to me. Thanks again for your support, it really does help. Please click here to go to the correct page on Amazon

Warehousing innovations take off

We’ve arrived at 2017.  Though I don’t recall seeing any technological predictions anchored on this particular year, we can look at what we’re supposed to be working toward with respect to the predictions for 2020 and what has come to light last year.  From that perspective, you can see that warehousing tech is a really hot area right now....

Though clouds refer to the computer kind, there now is the possibility of moving warehousing to actual cloud in the sky. That’s a possibility that Amazon seems to be considering based on the patent for an “airborne fulfilment center utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles for item delivery”  that  that came to light this past December. The airborne fulfillment center (AFC) based on an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is no mere drone. It is something much larger like the LCA60T flying whale airship discussed here, though with a variety of options.

Image courtesy: Flying Whales

Read more in 

Sky’s the Limit for Tech Innovations in Warehousing

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2016/08/up-up-and-away-way-its-done-today.html

Tech Forecast for 2016

 Sarah Lahav, CEO of SysAid Technologies gives her take on what we can expect to see this year. .in 

2016: 6 New IP Predictions

For one of the predictions, I was really tempted to put in a reference to The IT Crowd. You should be able to guess which one.

The best of both the online and bricks-and-mortar worlds

With the all-important holiday shopping season around the corner, retailers are doing whatever it takes to win customers in the United Kingdom. eBay is betting on a combination of online ordering and in-person pick-up with a six-month trial of “click and collect,” where the online auction house provides delivery to Argos stores for a number of its sellers.

The partnership gives customers the best of both the online and bricks-and-mortar worlds. Read more in 

eBay Bets on In-Person Pick-Up Partnership

Smartphone signals for retail analytics

Shopping online offers customers convenience and price transparency, but it offers retailers even more. As Amazon has demonstrated in its successful model, the information it derives from its customer behavior online gives it insight that it uses to tailor its marketing to the individual. As your online browsing tracks, not only what you buy, but what you considered buying, the retailer gets to learn a lot more about you than the person who rings up your purchase at a store. How can a bricks-and-mortar establishment compete with that kind of analytic edge?

 Read more in In-Store Customer Analytics Get Digital Twist