Yes, I did in fact call both of my senators. Neither was one of the eight, but I told them to strongly urge their colleagues not to make this deal.
Your cynical assumptions about what people did or did not do are pointless. Go do something yourself and quit making up shit to chastise others for.
It will hurt them regardless of where they try to shift the blame. Their share prices will still drop if their earnings miss expectations.
But medium to long term you're right, and specifically people should be buying from local and small businesses as much as possible. Not just for holidays but in general. No corporations are our friends. The economy needs a rebalancing toward localism. Corporations have captured our political system. Aside from regulation and strong antitrust, our best weapon against them as consumers is to deny them our money. One of their weaknesses is that the market demands perpetual growth. Deny them that growth and feed it to small/medium-sized business and their grip on us will begin to loosen.
Of course that requires sustained mass action, not one-off boycotts, but individual choices add up to something real over time.