Over Thanksgiving weekend, tens of thousands of people across the country came together to say “We Ain’t Buying It!” to companies that have capitulated to Trump.

From Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, they participated in a shopping pause at Target, Home Depot, and Amazon, in protest of those retailers completely caving to the Trump administration and going along with their harmful, authoritarian policies.

• Target rolled back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies
• Home Depot has done nothing to protect immigrants in their stores as ICE continues to conduct violent raids on their property.
• Amazon has funded the Trump administration through donations and significantly discounted government contracts (including for ICE), all in exchange for massive corporate tax breaks.

We Ain’t Buying It! was a chance to flex our power as consumers and leverage that power to protect our democracy during one of the peak shopping weekends of the year. These retailers think they profit when they go along with Trump, so we took coordinated action to make it clear that there is a price to pay for enabling authoritarianism.

And it wasn’t just Indivisible that took a stand. The campaign was the result of close partnerships with several organizations, including Black Voters Matter, Until Freedom, and 50501. And one of the key benefits of We Ain’t Buying It! was the opportunity to build stronger bonds within that coalition for this type of economic noncooperation, particularly with the Black-led organizations and primarily BIPOC movements that have long been leading the charge on holding these corporations accountable.

But the time-bound nature of the campaign also offered an opportunity to test the Indivisible movement’s ability to engage in economic noncooperation actions.

These actions are relatively new for Indivisible — traditionally our campaigns have focused on influencing elected officials, rather than corporate targets. We’re still learning where our strengths lie and where we may need to keep building, in order to inform future action. And we want to share our assessment with our movement, so that we can all be clear-eyed about what it will take for us to engage in economic noncooperation that results in meaningful impact.

Here’s What We Learned

Despite the buzz that We Ain’t Buying It! got in the press and on social media, actual participation remained a challenge. We estimate that a quarter of the Indivisible movement participated in the shopping pause over Thanksgiving weekend. That’s a substantive part of our movement, but not a majority. So even with the tens of thousands of people that participated, we fell short of the scale we need to truly have an impact on massive corporations, especially when those corporations don’t have other vulnerabilities that make them more movable (like Disney CEO Bob Iger’s personal reputation of sharing progressive values being at stake when Jimmy Kimmel’s show was cancelled).

Participation was high among the most engaged portion of our movement and they demonstrated a lot of enthusiasm over the campaign, but that didn’t translate into sustained momentum across the entire Indivisible network, and did not seem to spill over to the general population. In order to build up our numbers, we’re going to have to address some of the most pressing barriers to participation: strategic skepticism, practical constraints, and inconvenience.

Strategic Skepticism

In our post-campaign survey of the Indivisible movement, skepticism came up frequently. People are doubtful that economic noncooperation works, especially against massive corporations like Amazon and Target. And they have a point — these companies operate at such a massive scale that the number of people participating in an economic pressure campaign needs to be similarly massive.

So, we not only need to reach larger swaths of our movement and the general public, but we need to get them bought in on the strategy. Everyone needs to believe they are joining an effort that can actually be successful and that enough other people will participate that we can make a difference.

Practical Constraints

Our survey also revealed that there were practical constraints that prevented people from being able to participate in the campaign, including price and availability. At a time where costs have risen across the board, many people prioritized shopping where they could get the best price for the items they needed. And the items they needed were not always available elsewhere or there weren’t always viable alternatives for shopping.

These pain points were a deliberate effort on the part of massive corporations — they undercut small and local businesses wherever possible in order to put them out of business and become the only option for many shoppers. So many people are dependent on these major retailers because they intentionally rigged the system. And if we don’t help folks manage the realities of participation, we can’t expect them to engage in economic noncooperation long-term. And we can’t leave those folks behind if we want to win.

Inconvenience

Another common reason people said they did not participate was the inconvenience the shopping pause would cause. They prioritized the ease that comes with shopping at Amazon, Target, and Home Depot and were less willing to be put out by shopping elsewhere.

It’s going to be necessary to continue to foster resilience within our movement, so that people are willing to put up with some inconvenience in order to take meaningful action.

What’s Next?

It’s clear that if we want to engage in even bigger economic noncooperation campaigns, we’ve got to continue building our power. It doesn’t appear that right now, we would be able to do a longer-term action that included more targets that had the level of participation needed to take on and beat the biggest, most powerful Trump-enabling corporations.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t get there. And we’re incorporating everything that we’ve learned from We Ain’t Buying It! and other economic noncooperation campaigns into our plans for 2026. And that almost certainly includes more economic noncooperation. Because we know it can work — it just requires us to bring more people along in solidarity with us and create a culture of defiance that millions of people want to be part of.

We’re continuing to build muscle here. It’s likely that we’ll do a number of different economic noncooperation actions next year, growing our movement so that when we take action, it’s a flex of strength that these massive corporations and the Trump administration can’t ignore.