"Advocates of the BP boycott say it is a way to make the oil giant pay for the gulf disaster," Coombes [image-nocss] said. "Tyson Slocum of [consumer watchdog group] Public Citizen claims his group has pledges from more than 10,000 people to boycott BP gas stations."
Public Citizen has launched a boycott campaign at BeyondBP.com. It says, "Take the Beyond BP Pledge! Drive a car? Like the occasional fountain drink? Send a clear message to BP by boycotting its gas and retail store products. Don't spend a cent of your hard-earned money to feed the bottom line of a corporation that has a sordid history of negligence, willfully violates environmental regulations, and is spewing thousands and thousands of barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico. I pledge to boycott BP for at least three months."
(Click here for previous CSP Daily News coverage of BP boycott attempts.)Said Slocum: "It's the collective action [at] all of the stations across the country, that will impact BP.... These are franchises, but they are selling the BP brand."
But John Kilduff of Round Earth Capital partners pointed out that the brand at the pump is not necessarily what's going into the tank.... The gasoline you by at a BP gas station might have been refined by ExxonMobil, Alon, Valero and/or BP.... The owner operators of the various stations would be hurt the most, not the big corporation."
Kilduff suggested that convincing BP shareholders to sell their stock would be more effective than a boycott of BP stations.
He added, "The owner operators of the various stations would be hurt the most [by a boycott of the retail outlets], not the big corporation."
Jay Ricker, president of Ricker Oil Co, Anderson, Ind., and chairman of the NAtional Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), emphasized that point. "Most of the BP stores in this country are owned by independent business owners like myself. So we'd be very devastated," he told CNBC.
C-store owners that sell BP-branded gasoline so far have not reported a drop in business, said a separate NBC report, unlike the consumer backlash at the pump following the Exxon Valdez spill 21 years ago. That disaster triggered protest rallies and consumers returned thousands of Exxon's credit cards to the company.
"These stores may sell a brand of liquid but that is the end of the association," NACS spokesperson Jeff Lenard told the news outlet.
A BP spokesperson told NBC that the company no longer owns or operates the majority of BP-branded sites in the United States, even though it supplies fuel to regional distributors and independent franchise owners.
For the most part it is business as usual with consumers who agree the spill is awful, but continue to buy gasoline based on price and convenience, the report said.
The Sierra Club is among the organizations not part of the BP boycott. The group told NBC that it instead will focus on getting the people in power to hold BP accountable for its actions and to renew efforts to ban offshore drilling altogether.
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