The “Buy Now” Campaign
In the early days of the Great Depression there were attempts to create a moral
imperative against the bargain craze that led consumers to postpone
purchasing.33 The Washington, DC, Chamber of Commerce launched a
campaign in 1930 with the slogan “Buy Now for Prosperity.” A “Prosperity
Committee” sought the participation of clergymen of all denominations to
“preach prosperity through their pulpits” and thereby to “stimulate production,
relieving the unemployment situation.”34 When he became president in 1933,
Franklin Roosevelt launched his own “Buy Now Campaign,” describing patriotic
citizens overcoming their impulse to wait for lower prices in order to support a
stronger economy.35 In August 1933, a “Buy in August” campaign described
patriotic people as making a special effort to buy retail products in August, the
slowest month of the year for retailers. Consumers were reminded that August
was “canning time” for many fruits and vegetables and so a good time to buy
them. The campaign publicized the seasonality of consumer prices, implying that
prices would rise for the rest of the year and that wise consumers should
purchase now.36 Clearly, the “Buy Now” campaign was an attempt to counter the
“prices will fall” narrative that had taken hold.

Later Boycott Narratives
After World War II, the United States experienced something akin to a repeat
performance of the 1920–21 depression and its boycotts. But this time
government authorities remembered the narrative of 1920–21 and used it to
guide their response. After the war ended in 1945, the US authorities maintained
the wartime price controls for a while to prevent the kind of inflation
experienced in 1919 after World War I. From April to October 1945 there was a
very brief but sharp recession linked to demobilization, a recession with stable
prices as measured. But as the US government lifted the controls, prices began to
rise rapidly, and by 1949 they were about 30% higher than they’d been in 1945.
Once again there was talk of consumer boycotts and a buyers’ strike, and there
was a recession in 1949 that resembled that of 1920. Newspapers again reported
that buyers were waiting for prices to come down before buying postponable
items.
The severe recession of 1973–75 is widely attributed to an embargo, the
selling counterpart of the boycott. The Arab oil embargo began in October 1973
during the Arab-Israeli (Yom Kippur) War. The embargo took the form of
limiting the supply of oil from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC), which sympathized with the Arab nations that had attacked
Israel and were about to be defeated, with US support of Israel. The embargo
was a principle- or emotion-driven event, continuing long after the war ended in
the same month it started. It was a statement of moral support for the Arab
countries, even though only one of the eleven OPEC countries (Iraq) was among
the five Arab countries that participated in the war.
Many of the narratives surrounding the recession of 1973–75 had a source in
human anger. The most cited cause of this recession—the oil crisis generated by
OPEC angrily protesting US support of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War—
was only part of the story. The price of oil suddenly quadrupled to unheard-of
levels, generating anger among consumers and stories of difficulties dealing with
oil rationing in the United States, such as odd-even rationing of gasoline.
(Consumers could buy gasoline only on odd-numbered days if their license plate
ended with an odd number, and only on even-numbered days if their license
plate ended with an even number.) Higher oil prices caused higher electric bills,
and anger at the perceived injustice was one of the reasons many people started

keeping much of their homes in darkness, as a sort of protest.37 In the period of
runaway US inflation of the 1970s, when many viewed inflation as the nation’s
most important problem, one observer wrote in July 1974, “Fighting inflation is
like fighting a forest fire, it requires courage, team play, and coordinated
sacrifice.”38 At the time, US annual inflation was 12%, which was a record high
excluding periods surrounding the world wars.
The firefighting metaphor has moral overtones that might have caused people
to curtail spending. Indeed, at the very beginning of the severe 1973–75
recession, in April 1973, there had been a “meat boycott” in which consumers
protested the high price of meat. That boycott reportedly put twenty thousand
US meat industry workers out of their jobs.39 In August there was a one-day
boycott, a “Don’t Buy Anything Day.”40 The next year, in January 1974, with the
economy well into the recession, angry consumers renewed the meat boycott and
extended it to a grain boycott.41 The boycott sentiment remained in consumer
consciousness for some time, generating reduced purchases of a wide array of
goods and services, leading to, or at least contributing to, the recession.
During the world financial crisis years 2007–9 thousands of boycotts were
reported, including boycotts of mortgage lenders and of gasoline, but boycotts
and profiteering did not appear to rise to the level of economic significance seen
in earlier episodes. Still, narratives that stimulate angry boycotts will likely
appear in the future, just as they have in the past. How emerging businesses and
labor unions are perceived—as either good or evil—matters greatly for the
future state of the economy, a topic to which we turn in the next chapter.