Two Starbucks locations bookend Emerson College’s campus on Boylston Street, making it a convenient coffee stop for Emersonians on the way to class or work. 

But some community members have joined a worldwide movement of boycotting Starbucks since October 2023 in response to the Starbucks Corporation suing its employee union for trademark infringement after they tweeted in support of Palestine. 

Last August, Emerson released interim expression policies following the arrest of 118 protesters one year ago in the 2 Boylston Place Alleyway. The new policies restrict the time, place, and manner of on-campus protests, disallowing them completely in the alley, and requiring actions to be pre-registered through the school in approved locations. Many community members feel that the interim policies restrict free speech. 

While boycotts are a form of political protest, there is nothing explicit in Emerson’s policies restricting community members from participating in boycotts. Lito Garcia, the operations coordinator for Emerson’s Office of the Arts, learned about the movements through social media, one of the biggest ways the word is spreading.

“There’s got to be some organizing focal point, and I suppose that’s social media nowadays,” Keith Hylton, a law professor at Boston University, said in an interview with The Beacon. “[This] immediately excludes some consumers, because there’s some who aren’t going to be connected on social media to the same groups.”

The People’s Union USA, a grassroots movement created to demonstrate the power of consumers and hold corporations accountable for alleged exploitation, suggested a short-term but hard-hitting approach against major corporations like Starbucks: an economic blackout. 

An economic blackout called on consumers to refrain from purchasing from a list of major corporations criticized for exploitation of employees or price gouging for an entire 24-hour period. This list includes corporations like Amazon, Walmart, and Target. The first blackout organized by the People’s Union USA occurred on Feb. 28 after going viral on social media.

Starbucks’ 2024 fiscal year report started tracking sales a week before the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in which Hamas militants killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis. Israel’s military has since killed an estimated 46,000 Palestinitans in the Gaza Strip in retaliation, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 

Directly following Oct. 7 attacks, Starbucks experienced a 5% increase in global store sales in the first quarter of the 2024 fiscal year (from October to December of 2023). Every quarter since has seen a decline: quarter two (January to March of 2024) saw a 4% drop; sales in quarter three (April to June 2024) were down 3%; and quarter four (July to September of 2024) sales fell by 7%. Overall, Starbucks has experienced a net 2% decline in global sales during the 2024 fiscal year.

The first quarter of the 2025 fiscal year, which ended on Dec. 29, 2024, showed that sales are still declining, though at a lesser quarterly rate than in the 2024 fiscal year.  

“Money is the only language the system understands,” the People’s Union USA website says. “We don’t need to riot or protest in the streets to be heard. All we have to do is stop feeding them.”

An Instagram post from the Boylston Street Students’ Union, an unaffiliated group of Emerson students, called on students to not spend campus Board Bucks nor ECcash on the day of the blackout in February.

“Seeing as Emerson is a sizable real estate conglomerate of downtown Boston, and they have openly capitulated to the [federal] administration’s attacks on marginalized communities, we call on our community to include Emerson and other universities complicit in genocide, into the economic blackout,” the group wrote in the caption of the post.

There was no significant decline in EC Cash or Board Bucks sales on Feb. 28 when compared to the week before and after, according to a spokesperson from Campus Services in an email to The Beacon.

Fox Williams, a creative writing major who is currently taking a leave of absence from Emerson, believes that the campus community as a whole participates in more boycotts than the average person.

“People at Emerson care,” Williams said. “Students here, especially artists, have a lot more empathy than the average Joe. I don’t think Emersonians [that aren’t boycotting] are beyond saving—they could be convinced to boycott places because of how easy it is.”

Williams also said that blackout days are an easy way for people to get involved with boycotts. 

“For a privileged country, it’s the people who don’t have as many means that find it easier to boycott things because it’s cutting out luxuries,” Williams said. “When you’re already living on the bare minimum, luxuries are not hard to cut out at all.”

This past January, Target rolled back on diversity, equity, and inclusion in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order eliminating DEI programs within the federal government. Both Williams and Garcia said they are currently boycotting Target because of this rollback.

“Target was never the best, but I had somewhat similar values,” Garcia said, referencing Target’s pride collections and support of the LGBTQ+ community. “With the rolling back of DEI, because I live at the intersection of a lot of diverse experiences, it was a pretty obvious pivot for me.”

On the day of the first economic blackout, Target experienced 10% less web traffic compared to two weeks earlier, according to Forbes. Target’s mobile app was reportedly also down 14% in user traffic on the blackout day. 

The economic blackout on Feb. 28 was the first in a series of planned boycotts and blackouts through July. Hylton said that the effectiveness of these actions relies on consumers’ determination to stick to the boycotts for long periods.

“It depends on whether consumers will actually stick to the boycott, will actually kind of spontaneously organize, which is a big question,” Hylton said. “An economist would say, ‘How do you get 1,000 people to commit to something, or agree to something, or to act in unison on something?’”

Boycotts might not be the only thing changing consumer habits. Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 1 to impose a 10% tariff on China and 25% on Mexico and Canada. Almost immediately, China retaliated, and imposed a 10% tariff on U.S. natural gas, and a second 10% tariff on U.S. food and agricultural products. 

The tariffs have continued to increase as Trump wages a trade war. The president, who has levied this economic policy in an attempt to boost domestic manufacturing, could push the global trade order to a breaking point as middle- and lower-class Americans could feel the strain on autos, housing, and clothing. 

Trump unveiled reciprocal tariffs on dozens of nations on April 2, a day he nicknamed “Liberation Day,” leading some U.S. trade partners, like China and Canada, to retaliate with their own tariffs on U.S. goods while other countries, like Japan and Vietnam, hoped to negotiate with Trump. As of April 12, the president has imposed a 145% tariff on China. Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods have risen to 125%.

The trade war is causing many Americans to spend more than normal in a phenomenon called “doom spending,” according to Reuters. It is currently unclear how, if at all, the tariffs and increased spending will affect current boycotts. 

Some Emersonians also doubt the effectiveness of these boycotts. Anna, a journalism student who preferred to only share her first name, said she does not believe boycotts work. She does not shop much at Target but still goes to Starbucks close to campus.

“It’s convenient and I’m friends with the staff,” Anna said. “I think boycotts are performative. A lot of people have good intentions, but every company is bad. Brandy Melville is objectively worse than some of the mainstream boycotts, but no one is boycotting them because it’s still ‘cool.’”

Brandy Melville has faced social backlash from some of their practices, like exclusionary small sizes and contributions to fast-fashion. Last April, HBO released a documentary titled “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion” which HBO described as “a toxic work environment and discriminatory recruiting methods.” There has not been a public call to boycott Brandy Melville. 

Anna also believes that the Starbucks boycott is misinformed. 

“I used to get dirty looks for drinking Starbucks, and I started pretending I didn’t know why,” Anna said. “I’d ask them why they were boycotting and they would all say 100% of the time ‘because Starbucks donates money to Israel.’ That never happened.”

Starbucks is not on the list of companies identified by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, as it does not have direct ties with Israel. However, some people online group Starbucks with other companies on the BDS list—McDonald’s, Google, Amazon—where the reason for boycott is to put pressure on companies viewed as “complicit” with the Israeli government’s actions in the Gaza Strip that “engage in violations of Palestinian human rights,” according to its website. 

Garcia also said that boycotting leads to shopping locally as a more ethical means of consumerism and a way of giving back to your community.

“Anything that is a genuine need, that you go to a big box store or Amazon for, you can find it locally,” Garcia said. “The idea of letting go of convenience is the next big step for those of us who are able.”

The next economic blackout on April 18 through April 20 will take place over a 72-hour period with the same goal: halt personal spending from all major corporations. During this longer period over Easter weekend, companies like Target and Starbucks may see another dip in profits, but Hylton emphasized that a variety of factors play into each case of a boycott.

“There’s some cases where a consumer boycott might be effective,” Hylton said. “Those would have to be cases where it’s a large percentage of consumers, and the boycott lasts long enough that it actually forces the company to choose between the boycott and the losses that it would suffer if it adopted the demands.”