Final Word from Thursday, February 22, 2024
Product boycotts are usually on the consumer level and target a popular, easily recognizable brand. At any given time, dozens of them are under boycott somewhere in the world. Public boycotts by one company of another are rarer. Carrefour of France recently delisted PepsiCo for what the retailer called excessively high prices. Rohlik.cz's boycott of the food products of Rabbit, owned by one of the spokesmen of the tractor protest on Mon., Zdeněk Jandejsek, is different. It's a moral proclamation against a company that isn't widely known but whose products (eggs, meat, poultry) are widely bought. Logically, some of Jandejsek's critics also want Rohlik to boycott Andrej Babiš's many brands (Olma, Penam, Tatra, etc.). Rohlik could then add companies to the blacklist that are still doing business in Russia (Bacardi, Coca-Cola, Ferrero, L'Oréal, Pepsi, Philip Morris, P&G, Storck, Unilever, etc.). The list of good causes is so vast that Rohlik would soon find it had few morally untainted products to sell. [ Czech Republic Rohlík.cz farmers agriculture Green Deal online retailer Procter & Gamble Agrofert ]
Glossary of difficult words
slippery slope - a course of action likely to lead to something bad or disastrous;
do-gooding - focusing on humanitarian causes in a naive and often ineffectual way;
to delist - to remove (a product) from the list of those sold by a particular retailer;
vast - of very great extent or quantity; immense;
untainted - not contaminated, polluted or discredited.