Because boycotting large corporations has worked so well for aggrieved conservatives (see: Starbucks, Keurig, the NFL), Vox is reporting that there were recent calls to #BoycottWalmart due to an “Impeach 45” t-shirt offered through the retailer’s third-party marketplace.
Gaining traction last week, the calls to boycott began when a group of hardworking Twitter heroes found the t-shirt — and accompanying baby onesie — available on the Walmart Marketplace, and then posted the link.
Outrage immediately ensued without much contextual clarity. The hashtag #BoycottWalmart “started to trend” and “many conservatives and Trump supporters [said they would] stop shopping at the retailer,” making them “only the latest company to get Trump’s supporters riled up.”
Walmart, however, doesn’t really have much to do with the shirts. They were only available on their e-comm marketplace — an arena that takes like a 10-minute application to enter and has very little oversight — and “[the] shirts that spurred the current… controversy are from [brands called] Old Glory and Teespring,” Vox reported.
(The story also notes that “Old Glory, specifically, sells both pro- and anti-Trump shirts,” which means their product pitch meetings must be fun.)
Before you anoint Walmart as merch HQ for the resistance, however, it’s important to mention that they quickly removed the offending items “pending review of their marketplace policies,” and that they’ve also allowed items with confederate flags and instructions for killing journalists in that same marketplace, and currently have plenty of MAGA gear available.
So boycott away, but as Vox duly noted, “Walmart is probably going to be fine… it had $485 billion in revenue in 2017.”
You can read more about at it Vox.
