T A B L E__T A L K Are big banks inherently evil? Why or why not? Deposit your 2 cents in the Business and Personal Finance area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The economy of fake fat By Heather Chaplin Olestra: the oil that leaves you running for the bathroom (07/31/98) Farmers of the American Dream By Carol Lloyd Financial infomercials promise "free money," but what they're really selling is their faith in your "potential" (07/24/98) Glutton for luxury By Heather Chaplin One woman's necessity is another woman's excess (07/17/98) Our watches, our selves By Robert Bryce As the economy keeps on ticking, the watch industry sells the daze of our lives (07/10/98) Pot of gold or P.C. money pit? By Heather Chaplin Are socially responsibility mutual funds good karma or bad business? (07/03/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Money feature archives		Boycotts are more effective than ever -- but the public's role in them is becoming increasingly irrelevant. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY KEVIN KELLEHER | In 1987, environmental groups called a boycott against Burger King to protest its use of beef raised on land in old-growth rain forests. In 1988, Burger King capitulated, ending the boycott. In 1998, my friend Marissa, a longtime volunteer for progressive causes, is still avoiding Burger King. When I tell her that the boycott is distant history, she is unapologetic. "I still don't think they're a good company," she says. "Besides, there are so many bad corporations, it's hard to pick the right boycott." More and more would-be boycotters find themselves in Marissa's position. It's been 118 years since his Irish tenants shunned any dealings with British Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott to make him pay for his ruthless eviction tactics. Today, the boycott is still thriving -- but the consumer, whose personal intervention ostensibly stands at its heart, is less and less important. Activists proudly proclaim that there are more boycotts wresting more good deeds from companies than ever, yet many who want to back them are feeling irrelevant. And keeping up with boycotts can be just as tricky as managing a stock portfolio. Is it OK to buy Nestlé's candy bars now? If you have that craving for a greasy meat slab, should you drive to McDonald's or to Burger King? Can you buy lettuce or table grapes in good conscience? Are you allowed to fill up at Exxon? At Shell? (Opinions vary on each but the consensus, based on my own research, is respectively, no, Burger King, yes, no, yes and no.) By some counts, there are 300 to 400 boycotts every year, so many that activist groups find it more effective to use public relations than wage war in the marketplace. "The fear that corporations have about boycotts is still intense," says Jeffrey Klein, editor of Mother Jones magazine. "But today that fear is as much about [negative] public relations as about anything." Commercial ostracism predates Capt. Boycott -- look at the Boston Tea Party in response to the Stamp Act -- nor is it a purely Western phenomenon: The Chinese protested the treatment of its citizens in the United States with an effective boycott in 1905. But boycotts have grown more organized and more commonplace in the United States and Europe as the labor movement and later the civil-rights movements gained strength. And their dynamics have changed dramatically over the past 50 years. "It used to be that you needed a community behind a boycott, a moral and ethical ground that people had in common," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of Virginia. So unions found it easy to rally boycotts around a local factory or shop where workers were striking. "Today, everything is national in scope. The distance between the consumption of a product and its production is much, much greater." Part of that change came from laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act that took some of the punch from labor-backed boycotts. Part came as the rise of the middle class gave the consumer intense power to punish corporate misdeeds. The shift from labor to consumer was galvanized with three successful campaigns -- the table grape boycott of the '60s, which led to new rights for migrant farm workers; the Pinto boycott of the '70s, which established Ralph Nader's consumer activist credentials; and the international boycotting of Nestlé over its use of unsafe infant formulas in third world countries. These victories, together with weakened unions and Reagan-era deregulation of industry, prompted activist groups to take on more and more boycotts. N E X T+P A G E | Public perception is key