Ford's Sept. Sales: Reuters Errs, While the Rarely Reported AFA Boycott Grows

Here's what Reuters said about Ford's September US performance, compared to what Ford's PR release actually said:

Oops.

Much more important, the saddest story almost never told by Old Media continues to play out.

The American Family Association began a boycott of Ford in March of 2006 over what it considers to be the company's overt pro-homosexual activism and support of other politically-correct causes.

Is the boycott having an effect? Here is Ford's sales performance in the US since then (most of the numbers are from an AFA spreadsheet; the numbers conform to my recall of what the company has reported during the period involved:

The company's sales performance has been consistently at least 10% worse than its major rivals during the period of the boycott. Now it's getting worse (see the August comparison here about 2/3 of the way through the link; Ford trailed the average of the rest of the pack by 16%). Could that be because ever more people (750,000 and counting) are participating in the boycott? In previous posts, I have estimated that at least 10 million to 15 million are actually participating in the boycott by the time you add up AFA's 3.2 million members, their family and extended-family members, influenced friends and relatives, and the impact of other participating organizations.

I personally wish Don Wildmon's crowd hadn't declared the boycott, because too many good people are getting hurt. But the fact is he did, and Ford looks like it would rather go under than acknowledge its probable impact. If this were still Henry Ford's private empire, you could perhaps defend the company's apparent willingness to commit corporate suicide (I still wouldn't, because you have employees, their families, suppliers, and the communities to consider). But Ford is a publicly owned company, and its duty is try to get its shareholders the best possible return on their investment within the law. They're not doing that, while traditional media refuse to explore the boycott's likely growing impact.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com and The Cleveland Plain Dealer's "Wide Open" Blog.