THE GOODS : Just Say No : It had to Happen. In an era of heightened consumer awareness, wary shoppers can turn to Boycott Quarterly,
Zachary D. Lyons should be wearing tights, a cape and a big B on his chest. He is, after all, Captain Boycott, or so he is known to his friends.
But, in his fifth year of publishing Boycott Quarterly, what he wears are jeans and flannels.
“I blend in quite well in the capital of grunge,” says Lyons, 32, from his home in Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood.
Little would passersby know that this peaceful character with the long hair is the man who helps to empower thousands of Americans by guiding their buying power, a man who sets corporate giants’ teeth on edge and a man who can’t resist a bit of effusive editorializing in his 50- to 70-page publication.
“We’re kicking corporate butt out there!” he exults in a recent editorial. Lyons sees consumer boycotts as a First Amendment right that in recent years has become more powerful than voting. In politics, if your candidate loses, you’re out of luck. But in an economic democracy, he says, every dollar counts as a means of supporting or withholding support from certain companies. “One dollar, one vote” is his favorite slogan.
“When you spend a dollar on a product, you’re voting for the way the producer of that product does business. Put your values up front and think about that.”
A staple of American life since the days of the Boston Tea Party, boycotting has blossomed as a political tool in the past several years, particularly in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, when outraged people across the country took part in a spontaneous boycott of the oil giant.
With the decades-long boycotts of grapes and Nestle products as precursors, new boycotts pop up every month. Lyons has his hands full keeping track of the scores of organized boycotts of products, companies, cities and states. In one issue, he even reported the boycott of an individual: Bruce Springsteen. The short-lived boycott of the Boss had occurred because the singer had crossed union picket lines and brought in out-of-state, non-union stage crew workers for an October, 1992, concert in Tacoma, Wash.
Putting out his glossy-covered magazine four times a year is Lyons’ full-time job. He ekes out a living from subscription and newsstand sales ($20 a year, $4.95 per copy). There are just 500 subscribers, although distribution for each issue is about 3,000 copies. As a matter of principle, he refuses to take advertising.
“It’s one of those things where, no matter who we would accept an ad from, somebody would be boycotting them and we’d lose credibility,” Lyons says.
Occasionally, Lyons misses a boycott. When that happens, it may be brought to his attention by Anne Zorc, editor of the Co-op America Quarterly, published in Washington, D.C.
Zorc’s publication, which goes to 50,000 co-op members, has an eight-page insert, Boycott Action News, listing current boycotts. Although Boycott Quarterly generally lists about three times more boycotts than Boycott Action News, Zorc says she and Lyons keep each other informed.
“He has his ear to the ground on the western boycotts and I’ve got my ear to the ground on the eastern boycotts,” Zorc says.
Other information sources for Lyons include the Label Letter, published bimonthly in Washington, D.C., by the AFL-CIO Union Label & Service Trades Department, which lists boycotts sanctioned by the AFL-CIO, and Bunny Huggers’ Gazette, a bimonthly publication based in Temple, Tex., that lists animal rights boycotts.
Lyons grew up in Niskayuna, N.Y., near Albany, one of two sons of college professors. After graduating from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, he moved to Seattle in 1985.
Lyons worked for Greenpeace, and later for a Seattle group promoting recycling. In 1988 he met Todd Putnam, who was publishing the National Boycott News. Lyons decided to try his hand at his own publication, Boycott Monthly, but one year ago, by mutual agreement, absorbed Putnam’s publication and became Boycott Quarterly.
Lyons says he isn’t quite as committed to the boycott lifestyle as Putnam, who was careful not to ingest boycotted foods, wear boycotted clothing or visit boycotted states.
But Lyons has made one major sacrifice: He gave up Pepsi, long his beverage of choice. PepsiCo, and all its subsidiaries, is the target of a longstanding boycott because the conglomerate does business in Burma, where a repressive military government rules.
Although there are readers of Boycott Quarterly who let the boycott listings rule their choices, Lyons says that “people shouldn’t look at Boycott Quarterly as a litmus test for being politically correct. It’s something people should look through to find the things that appeal to their values.”
Indeed, in the same issue of Boycott Quarterly, he’ll list the latest boycotts in the American Family Assn.’s war on pornography alongside boycotts called by anti-censorship groups.
“I think I’ve always like the concept of boycotting,” he says. “It’s so accessible. Anybody can do it.”
At the same time, he cautions, “People’s purchases should reflect their values. They shouldn’t have to wait until an organized boycott comes along. But sometimes a company just needs a good kick in the pants to get the point, and that’s what boycotts do.”
Dollar Value
Here are some of the latest boycotts, as reported in the spring, 1995, issue of Boycott Quarterly:
* The International Wildlife Coalition is sponsoring a boycott against Adidas, Browning, Florsheim and Puma shoes, saying the companies use skins of inhumanely killed kangaroos.
* The Boycott San Francisco group asks that tourists stay away, in protest of the city’s intolerant policies toward the homeless.
* The Chicage Animal Rights Coalition is supporting a boycott of United Airlines, Sears, Roebuck, and Coca-Cola, because all three are sponsors of Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, which the coalition says is a hotbed of “marine slavery.”
