They poured out the liquid — blueberry-flavored, orange-flavored, and the original unflavored version wrinkling the face — tweeting #DumpRussianVodka and, at gay bars across the country, did it with Absolut and soda instead.
This was 2013, after Vladimir V. Putin imposed harsh new measures targeting LGBTQ Russians.
And as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine takes a horrific human toll, turning millions into refugees, the boycotts are back: American consumers channeling their outrage by dumping products they believe were produced by Russians in Russia, which somehow way to have ties with Mr Putin.
The problem with that logic is that Americans hardly consume any products that are truly Russian. That goes for vodka – and also for oil. Russian oil makes up 3 percent of what Americans consume daily.
This false impression has led people to punish companies that are truly Russian in name only. Some states that recently banned Russian liquor found that they had policies that affected only two brands with a small footprint domestically: Russian Standard and Ustianochka. President Biden announced a ban on all Russian liquor imports on Friday. But less than 1 percent of the vodka consumed here comes from Russia, a beverage industry trade group has noted.
The vodka most often but erroneously associated with Russia, Stolichnaya, has been hit again by online boycott calls. It has been produced in Latvia since 2002 and the headquarters of the parent company, the Stoli Group, is located in Luxembourg. Last week, the company formally rebranded its signature spirit as Stoli, after bar owners from Vermont to Michigan to Iowa stated they would no longer serve it and shared video of themselves throwing bottles of it down the drain.
In New York, the famous red benches in the Russian Tea Room are not so full of patrons these days. But the restaurant’s Russian heritage is kind of handy. It was opened in 1927 by a Polish immigrant who called it the Albertina Rasch Russian Tea Room – after a ballet dancer who was Viennese, although many assumed she was Russian at the time.
In Chicago, a Russian-style bathhouse called Red Square has reported receiving strange calls from people trying to determine whether it has sided in the war. But Red Square is co-owned by a man who was born in Ukraine and said he still has family in the country.
In Washington, the windows of the Russia House restaurant near Dupont Circle were broken and a door was smashed. The co-owner told local media that the company, which has been closed since the pandemic, has no connection with Russia. According to her website, which advertises caviar spreads as the kind of indulgence many Americans associate with Russian decadence, one owner fought in the Gulf War and the other was born in Lithuania.
The misguided fury of the resistance against Russia has been an instructive development for those who study consumer habits, highlighting the ways in which boycotts are particularly ineffective and often counterproductive as a means of protest in the social media age. A staple of American political resistance since the Boston Tea Party, boycotts have played a vital role in shaping public opinion on social progress demonstrations. The bus boycotts for civil rights in the South and the grape boycotts in the 1960s and 1970s to protest conditions for farm workers helped bring about meaningful change.
But that is no longer the case today, despite the exponential growth in the number of boycotts against large companies. A study conducted by a pair of scientists, Maurice Schweitzer of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Joseph Gaspar of Quinnipiac University, found that calls for boycotts against Fortune 500 companies had nearly tripled since 2010. published also found that the most common trigger was politics.
Boycott calls can be effective by creating bad publicity that tarnishes a company’s brand image, at least temporarily. Sometimes they urge companies to change, like a backlash against SeaWorld over the treatment of orcas did. The company announced in 2016 that it was ending its breeding program, meaning the generation of orcas now present in its theme parks will be its last.
But more often, consumer boycotts don’t have a major impact on the target company’s bottom line because they’re either too hard to sustain, as people discovered when they tried to avoid BP gas after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or because they inspire a lively response from consumers who want to support a company precisely because it is being attacked.
After Chick-fil-A’s chief executive expressed his opposition to same-sex marriage in 2012, mayors in liberal cities like San Francisco and Boston said the Southern fried chicken eatery should look elsewhere to open new restaurants. Conservatives like Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist preacher and two-time presidential candidate, gathered their followers to support the chain. The nationwide expansion continued at a rapid pace and there are now Chick-fil-A restaurants from Brooklyn to Seattle.
“It turns out to be either too tasty or too convenient,” said Mr. Schweitzer of the Wharton School of avoiding certain products. Another factor, he added, is the sheer volume of news that people find politically motivating. “Weekly or monthly there is something to be outraged about,” he said. “And at the moment the emotion feels raw and powerful, but we don’t realize how fleeting that is.”
One of the reasons boycott calls continue to grow, despite their ineffectiveness, is that many people seem to believe they are sticking to their guns when they are not.
A draft of a new study by scientists from Northwestern University, the University of Toronto and Harvard Business School examined the impact of several recent politically motivated calls to action, including the campaign to boycott Starbucks or, conversely, “buy” Starbucks. after announcing in 2017 that it would take on 10,000 refugees. The move came in response to former President Donald J. Trump’s order to halt migration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
The war between Russia and Ukraine and the world economy
Researchers surveyed more than 1,000 consumers, got their actual spending at Starbucks over several months, and asked if they’d changed their shopping habits because of the refugee announcement. They found that those who reported changing their habits — either in support of Starbucks by buying more or against it by boycotting — were actually doing nothing else.
Katy DeCelles, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and one of the authors of the study, said the results showed that people of all political persuasions believed what they wanted to be true about their own behavior.
The researchers found there was no measurable impact on spending with such an emotionally charged and widely publicized issue.
“We thought if we found an effect on people’s behavior, it would be now,” Ms DeCelles added.
As that research — and current anti-Stoli sentiment — shows, the anger channeled into consumer boycotts often lacks consistent logic. While some states like Pennsylvania and Oregon have not included Stoli in their bans on Russian liquor, New Hampshire has. A spokesman for the state’s liquor commission confirmed that because Governor Chris Sununu’s order applies not only to Russian-made products, but also to “Russian-branded” products, Stoli from the shelves of state-operated stores would stay.
Damian McKinney, chief executive of the Stoli Group, said in an interview that wrong impressions about the brand have almost resulted in major corporate losses. He recalled a recent conversation with the head of a major retailer in Britain, who had told him that Stoli was about to be taken off the shelves.
‘I said, ‘Do you know we’re Latvian?’ And there was a pause,’ said Mr. McKinney, refusing to give the shopkeeper’s name. As he spoke, the background for his Zoom screen was framed in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag alongside the hashtag #StandWithUkraine. “I needed people to understand that we are on the right side. And this is about a bad man and a regime, not about the Russian people,” he added, noting that Stoli employs both Russians and Ukrainians.
Like many companies, Stoli does not have a clear identity that is easy to define. The recipe is Russian, just like the name. “Stolichnaya” roughly translates to “metropolitan.” The company’s founder, Yuri Shefler, fled Russia after a dispute with the government over control of the Stoli trademark. He currently lives in Switzerland. Russia has been fighting Stoli in court for years over the rights to claim ownership of the name. The company makes its caps and some of its bottles in Ukraine and recently evacuated five Ukrainian workers from the country to Cyprus and Luxembourg, Mr McKinney said.
The Russian Tea Room, where only a handful of tables were occupied during Friday’s pre-theatre rush, has an equally complicated lineage despite its name. The current owner is a real estate developer in New York. But it started in 1927 as a popular meeting place among Russians who immigrated to America and became citizens. A 1977 New York Times story about the restaurant’s 50th anniversary noted that the restaurant was frequented early on by exiles calling themselves “Belarusians” to differentiate themselves from Lenin’s “red” Bolsheviks.
And nearly a century later, making that distinction with the Moscow regime is as important as ever. On the restaurant’s website, a pop-up banner statement about the war in Ukraine greets visitors, pointing to the restaurant’s history as an institution “deeply rooted in speaking against the communist dictatorship.” It adds: “We stand against Putin and with the people of Ukraine.”
Kristen Noyes contributed to research.
