When Bud Light offended its customers by hiring a female impersonator as a spokesperson, those customers walked away. Their boycott nearly destroyed the brand.
There are other ways that retailers—particularly large retailers—betray their customers. One is pushing the cost of “woke” government policies onto us instead of pushing back against the policies themselves.
A Personal Story
I patronized a multi-location physical therapy company. Rather than having the company contact Medicare, Medicaid, or an insurance company for payment, I wrote a personal check in advance of each visit. In the health care business, this is called “self- pay.” Before 1965, when the federal government intruded heavily into health care, it was how most bills were handled. Because government and insurance company bureaucracies usually were not involved, medical costs were a tiny fraction of what they are now.
Self-payers continue to benefit health care in several ways. First, they inject some salutary market control into the system. Second, they save providers the paperwork and other hassles of dealing with government and insurance bureaucracies. Because the self-payer lays down cash at the time of service, the provider gets his money right away instead of waiting weeks or months for the bureaucrats to get around to paying the bill.
In recognition of these benefits, many providers give discounts to self-payers. If they bill the insurance company $100, they might bill the self-payer $65. I have just such an arrangement with my own family doctor.
So imagine my surprise and disgust when I learned several weeks later that this physical therapy firm was responding to my saving them time and money by charging me extra!
And that “extra” was substantial. It was, on average, about 35 percent more than they were charging Medicare. It was 90 percent more than they were billing to some insurance companies.
I found this both nutty and unfair. But when I raised the issue with one of the owners, she was unbending.
One of her reasons was frankly redistributionist: She said that Medicare, Medicaid, and some insurance companies pay less than they should (which is true), but she wanted her firm to “serve the community.” And the only way she could “serve the community” was to soak people like me.
In other words, I was subsidizing her redistributionist goals. But what was worse, is that I also was subsidizing bureaucracies that fail to compensate adequately. And I was subsidizing Medicare patients, some of whom are far weathier than I am, and Medicaid beneficiaries, some of whom are on the program because they refuse to work (The One Big Beautiful Bill addresses this problem.)
It is not enough that I pay for those programs in taxes. I also have to pony up extra in private transactions as well. That’s part of the cost of government-run health care that doesn’t show up in the official figures.
The Bigger Problem
My experience with the physical therapy company is part of a wider phenomenon: Instead of defending their customers by working to defeat politicians responsible for wasteful programs, some businesses merely acquiesce and shift the cost to their customers.
My own state of Colorado offers some examples. Colorado used to be one of America’s most liberty-loving states. After my wife and I moved back here from Montana in 2010, Colorado lurched hard to the left. Radical “progressives” have super-majority control of the legislature and of every statewide elected office.
True to form, those “progressives” have set about the grim process of demolishing the state.
The damage is everywhere. You see it in the swarm of drug-damaged vagrants. In government budget shortfalls. In the deterioration of the roads. In the traffic jams and business closures caused by slow repairs and “woke” construction projects.
Particularly illustrative are the crime statistics: From 2010 to 2024, car theft in Colorado tripled, violent crime nearly doubled, and larceny—which includes a wave of shoplifting—jumped nearly 32 percent.
The response of big retailers to the crime wave has been precisely wrong. Instead of pushing back hard against leftist policies and working to defeat the offending officeholders at the polls, they shift the burden of crime to innocent customers.
Colorado used to be a safe and friendly state. But in many locations, retailers bar customers from the shelves. A customer must ring for a store employee and ask him to unlock the display case to access a product. Customers are barred from store bathrooms unless they track down a store employee and get the code to the lavatory lock. Before a customer leaves the store, he must submit to a security officer’s inspection.
When the state legislature considered a bill banning retail plastic bags, the big stores seem to have been AWOL. The bill passed. Now consumers receive no plastic bags and must pay for paper bags. Some of the payment is earmarked for environmentalist propaganda. Also banned were bags made from corn and other plant sources— except for hemp, which is exempt from the prohibition. (Care to guess why?)
Instead of opposing this ridiculous anti-consumer law and working to defeat the malefactors responsible, most large retailers just shifted the burden to their customers. Walmart even imposed the most onerous restriction on its customers a year before the law mandated it.
The Solution
Businesses have a duty to stand up for their customers when politicians attack them. But some businesses will shirk this obligation as long as we let them do so. We can respond (1) by refusing to patronize companies that betray their customers and (2) by making a lot of noise about it.
That’s why, when I learned that my physical therapy firm was shifting the cost of redistribution to me, I discontinued my patronage. If a store fails to stand up against leftist thugs and imposes their demands on me, I stop or reduce shopping at that store. In response to Colorado’s ban on retail plastic bags, I buy them from out-of-state—for much less than the state charges for paper bags—and I use them in Colorado.
As Bud Lite’s experience shows, when more of us act that way, businesses and politicians get the message.
Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor who is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver, authored “ The Original Constitution ” (4th ed., 2025). He is a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s “Heritage Guide to the Constitution.”
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