BP - Boycotted Product

In light of the latest failure to plug the leak in its Gulf of Mexico oil well, BP is facing numerous complaints - mostly of the scathing variety - and a large boycott of its products, which include BP and Arco gasoline and Castrol motor oil. I, of course, am steering clear of BP gas after having spent twenty years of going out of my way to buy it.

Let me explain. Buying gas from BP or Amoco, which BP merged with, has been a time-honored practice in my family. My maternal grandfather would always get gasoline from Amoco gas stations back when Amoco was called American (Amoco was an acronym for American Oil Company) and gas stations were called service stations. More recently, I had long bought Amoco gas when it merged with BP in 1998, and I would make it a point to buy BP gas largely because they were just the about the only oil company that advocated doing something about global warming and because they were investing in alternative fuels. Or so they said.

BP acted the part of good citizen for so long, but, well, you know what great actors the British are. Simply put, BP + PR = BS. They're a voracious oil company, pure and simple, and even though they may have a couple of alternative fuel programs going on, they're primarily out for the oil. They'd bent and broken rules for years to get oil off American shores and refine it into gasoline with no regard to the environment or worker safety, and the oil well in the Gulf they'd been leasing ended up compromising both in a big way. I don't think I'll miss going to a BP gas station for a long time to come.

Side story: One New Jersey motorist told the Newark Star-Ledger that he intends to keep buying BP gas because it's reasonably priced, and BP can't be blamed for "a mistake they didn't intend to make." Uh, since when is a mistake made on purpose? It wouldn't be a mistake, then, would it? But the atrocious business practices that made this mistake possible were clearly deliberate.