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That said, only certain companies are able to take advantage of virtue signaling in branding. In retail, it will typically be the brands like in this case. They are the endpoint of a very long supply chain. And perhaps that's good enough for a customer – to only need to navigate the values the various brands advertise. Going deeper will be way beyond any consumer, the number of organizations and their moral values to navigate becomes overwhelming.
Take something as simple as a pencil, try to navigate the values of the multitude of organizations involved in producing a single pencil.
They are turning down business and a denying a significant portion of the brand identity that they have constructed in order to make a point and course-correct to be more true to their values.
To call this virtue signalling is to betray either a fundamental misunderstanding of what "virtue signaling" means, or a bad-faith attempt to plaster any progressive sentiment as phony.
Dixon Ticonderoga or bust.