A boycott is different than just a general call to not patronize a business.
If a boycott is organized and specific, with an obtainable demand, it can work. A general “we don’t like Amazon’s business practice so don’t shop there” won’t work, but a “everyone in our 2 million member group won’t shop there until you grant workers X benefit, and we will also boycott any partner company until it happens” has an actual chance of success, since there is a specific thing for Amazon to base a choice on (is the cost of the lost business more than benefit x). If I just don’t patronize them but don’t have a specific demand, Amazon isn’t going to be put into any sort of position to make a trade off decision.
A boycott is never going to put a company out of business.
There haven't been many successful boycotts in the past. Despite decades of BDS campaigning Israel is still around (and so are Sodastream, Coca Cola and a host of other companies targeted by BDS). The only one I can recall of having worked was the Shell boycott [1], but that one was easy to pull off as there is healthy competition in the gas sector whereas there is barely any in convenient online shipping.
Ironically the only reason there is healthy competition to Shell was because the government stepped in to break up Standard Oil, who had a monopoly up to that point.
I know this is an unpopular opinion on HN but it always comes back to governments being the ones who need to regulate industry because literally nobody else has both the incentives and the power to enact that kind of change. You either have industry self regulate, but as we’ve seen, the incentives just isn’t there for them to behave. Or the customers boycotting a business, and has been discussed already, customers can’t agree on a collective action large enough to make any difference at all.
