Consumer Boycotts and Fast-Food Chains: Economic Consequences and Reputational Damage
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The increasing avoidance of international fast-food chains is a widespread phenomenon influenced by economic, social, and political factors. This study examines the risks and implications of restaurant boycotts, focusing on their role in social justice movements and economic shifts. The authors employed the qualitative approach; using an exploratory case study and a critical discourse analysis, we investigated consumer motivations for avoidance, the financial and reputational risks businesses face, and how corporate responses shape brand perception. By integrating political consumerism and social justice theory, we provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the psychological, ethical, and economic drivers of boycotts. The findings highlight that boycott behavior significantly impacted declining sales and profits for McDonald’s and Starbucks and forced the closure of outlets, as well as leading to the loss of consumer trust and long-term brand loyalty. Thus, it forced companies to create strategies for protecting their reputation. Consumer activism, which draws from social justice and ethical consumerism, demonstrates its capability to affect corporate policy choices and business practices in sensitive political situations to fight injustices. This research offers valuable insights for business leaders navigating consumer activism, emphasizing the need for proactive corporate responsibility strategies to mitigate the risks of reputational damage and declining consumer trust.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it