Sunday morning, a video of a man tossing his Keurig coffee machine from a second-story balcony made the (g)rounds. It’s been tweeted more than 13,000 times between just the original poster and one who implored his followers to “retweet to offend a liberal.” The destruction owes to the manufacturer of the convenient, though ecologically iffy coffeemaker pulling its advertising from Hannity’s time slot after being singled out by Media Matters president Angelo Carusone.
“Good afternoon @Keurig. You are currently sponsoring Sean Hannity’s show. He defends child molester Roy Moore and attacks women who speak out against sexual harassment. Please reconsider,” he tweeted on Friday. Keurig responded Saturday saying it stopped its ad from airing during the Fox News program. And Hannity’s rabid fans responded with a viral campaign of highly watchable destruction.
Their chosen mode of protest is unlikely to have any effect. A “boycott” that cuts off use of a product one already owns means less than a campaign to limit the consumption of the politically offensive product. Historian Lawrence Glickman of Cornell University, a scholar of consumerism activism, tells me there are two types of boycott in American history.
The eighteenth-century style which targeted use of politically verboten products was “performative,” he says. The far more common version nowadays focuses on the initial transaction—it’s likelier to pack an economic punch. “Someone has already purchased the Keurig machine, paid the company, supported the company, and now is just breaking it as a show of allegiance,” Glickman observes. “That’s what I mean by ‘performative.’ That’s how consumer activism used to work.”
He compares the Great Keurig War of 2017 to the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists who tried to salvage some of the 92,000 pounds of British East India Company Tea that washed ashore were punished for their deficient patriotism—“even though at that point there was no one being financially rewarded for it.”
Of course the Keurig destroyer also implies by smashing his coffeemaker to smithereens that he’ll cease regular consumption of the little K-cup capsules of concentrated coffee grounds. (It’s hard to imagine any were frugal enough to wait till they ran out of K-cups to chuck their coffee makers out the window, though.) While Hannity fans work out their frustrations on a machine they’ll probably miss later, “The unstated promise is that you’d have no more need for any future Keurig products of any sort,” Glickman rightly notes.
But, thanks to the proven phenomenon that drives a “counter-boycott,” those among us who favor good-tasting coffee or care about the environment but can’t stand Sean Hannity may discover they hold a strange new sympathy for the Keurig. In cases where the counter-protest wins, “a boycott ticks off more people than it brings in—and winds up being an economic boon.”
A year from now, Glickman predicts approximately zero economic impact on the company.
There may even be an uncharacteristic upswing in purchases this holiday season: “It’s very much an uphill slog when the Keurig coffee pot had become so popular for a reason.”
Namely, the one-two punch of its unsurpassed convenience: The Keurig doesn’t make more coffee than you need, requires no regular cleaning, and doesn’t make you wait long while it brews—and it has a caffeine-addicted customer-base. “There are likely a lot of people who will slink back to the mall, or Internet, and get a new pot for themselves,” Glickman says.
Or maybe Hannity will get a new one for them. As The Hollywood Reporter writes, he told listeners of his radio program Monday afternoon he would replace any machines that were spiked in protest. He also told any would-be participants in the boycott not to do it. “Frankly, I think [Keurig] were victims of a group they knew nothing about,” he said, referring to Media Matters.
