Purple Tuesday’s capitalist bullshit is nauseating

Batten down the hatches, everyone. Purple Tuesday is upon us. Yep, alongside disabled people being told we’re all worthless scroungers for daring to buy ourselves something nice, today we’re inundated with social media posts about disabled people’s “buying power”

Purple Tuesday doesn’t help disabled people

Purple Tuesday is supposed to be a day for businesses to commit to providing and improving access to services for disabled people. But instead, it’s become a day for brands and businesses to brag about how much they care about the money in our pockets, more than actually supporting us.

According to the UK Disability Survey:

• 78% of disabled people find shops inaccessible
• 66% find pubs and bars inaccessible
• and 48% find theatres and cinemas inaccessible

We should be committing more to helping disabled people access services. However, as with most ‘big’ disability awareness days, the focus has been taken away from actual disabled people and instead has become a day for brands patting themselves on the back. The reality is that more  disabled people than ever feel isolated.

What ‘spending power’?

A big focus of Purple Tuesday is The Purple Pound. The idea behind the venture is that if businesses don’t make sure they’re accessible, then they’re missing out on a bunch of extra dosh. The purple pound is, apparently, now worth £446 billion. The Purple Tuesday lot loves to make it seem like we’re all just sitting on all this disposable income that we’re eager to give away if only we had a ramp into a shop.

But in actual fact, it’s the combined income of households with a disabled person in after bills. And, this doesn’t account for how much more expensive it is for disabled people to live and the fact that disabled households need £1,095 more a month to live. 74% of all people using Trussell foodbanks in 2024 are disabled, and 79% of all users came from a disabled household.

Silencing our cries for accessiblity

By making the day about brands getting to pretend they care about disabled people, the voices of disabled people who try to speak up are invalidated. I find it most shocking that Boots is a UK founding sponsor, when Boots stores are still so inaccessible to many. A few months ago, a wheelchair using friend of mine had to have an injection over a bin in the middle of a store because the private consultation room was inaccessible to her.

In this scrabble to prove how much they love disabled people, you also see a flurry of social media posts that don’t even consider basic accessibility enough to use alt text for screen readers. If you can’t be bothered to use something that simple, how can disabled people trust our needs will be considered by you?

Disabled people are being attacked for living our lives

But more than that, at a time of such huge financial insecurity for disabled people, where we’re attacked daily by politicians, the media, and gobshites on Twitter for daring to spend our money on things that aren’t thin porridge or a second hand sack to wear, it’s incredibly fucking crass that brands are out there acting like we’ve got money to piss up the wall.

If businesses truly cared about disabled people, they’d make their premises and websites not only more accessible, but more affordable. Purple Tuesday is no longer about real disabled people – it’s just another day to hold accessibility aloft via capitalist values before you go back to ignoring us tomorrow.

Featured image via Unsplash/Yomex Owo