Hobby Lobby Boycott

For John, BLUF:  Boycotts need a very large backing.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Frankly, it confuses me.  When I was younger (1966) HOBBY LOBBY was the call sign of a USAF Radar Site in Thailand, near the Mekong Rver, as I recall.  Their main job was air defense of Thailand.  Their real job was to help Fighters looking for gas to rendezvous with KC-135 Tankers looking to pass gas.  They did their job well.

Now Hobby Lobby is a chain of crafts stores and it has just won a big decision from the US Supreme Court on the question of having to provide certain kinds of birth control as part of their health plan.  They don't.  As a result, there have been calls for a boycott.

Writing for Bloomberg, Ms Megan McArdle looks at the effectiveness of boycotts and its chances against Hobby Lobby—"Hobby Lobby's Boycotters Aren't Crafty Enough".  From the article, the lede:♠

Facebook and Twitter are on fire. I haven’t seen people so angry about anything since the 2012 decision on Obamacare.  One item of interest:  people announcing boycotts of Hobby Lobby and confidently predicting that it will soon be out of business.

Demographics count.  As Ms McArdle notes:

At least in my circles, everyone in the crafting demographic meets at least one of the following criteria, and often all of them:  conservative, Christian, married, older, stay-at-home mom.  I’m not saying this is universal; I’m sure there are young, single, progressive crafters out there! But the overlap between the people in my Facebook feed proclaiming a boycott and the people in my Facebook feed whom I know to be frequenters of crafting stores is basically zero.  The people with the passion are not the people who will be crafting, in other words.

But, announcing a boycott makes great copy!

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  There has been some confusion in my larger family about the use of the term "lede".  It is a newspaper term to distinguish lead (pronounced lēēd) from lead (pronounced led).  This became somewhat important with the introduction of the Linotype Machine and hot lead type setting, as opposed to the old pulling of the letters out of little boxes and putting them in a fixture.  Thus the lead paragraph became the "lede" paragraph.