It’s really quite unfortunate that capitalism fuses itself with politics and social issues. Sometimes I don’t know how to fight back other than not give them my business. Money is what matters most to them, right?
That Online Giant
I am often amazed by Amazon and order from there often. You can order just about anything you want and it shows up on your doorstep one to two days later. How do they do that?
My husband avoids Amazon as much as possible. It seems to be a morals vs. convenience situation and he took the high road.
My husband is very passionate about politics and social justice, and workers’ rights are very important to him.
But There Are Others…
My husband will not fill up at a BP station. He will drive to another part of town if he has to. This goes back to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
He’s not alone in boycotting businesses. I do it, too.
I will not shop at Hobby Lobby or eat at Chick-fil-A. I’ve avoided those businesses for years.
Chick-fil-A is very popular where we live and I stew in my anger every time I go by and see their drive-thru line so long that it’s spilling out into the street.
Hobby Lobby is easy for me to avoid. I shopped there occasionally before the insurance and birth control issues and I was always annoyed by the plethora of Christian items. Besides, Michael’s is better anyway.
I would love to hear what businesses you avoid.
Am I your husband and I don’t know it? I also don’t shop at Amazon, BP, Hobby Lobby, or Chick-Fil-A for the same reasons. I used to shop often at Whole Foods but stopped when they became Amazon. I don’t shop at Walmart. I canceled Spotify when I found out they were paying that arse-barge Joe Rogen $100M for a podcast full of racist BS, and that they are producing their own no-name music to fill air time so they can pay actual musicians even less. I tried to boycott TurboTax, but thanks to their lobbying my tax forms are still so complicated I had to give in.
I agree with both of you about those businesses, and add Wal-Mart and Publix.
But my most difficult boycott – one that I have to break at times, but for non-personal causes, is Facebook. The easiest are Twitter, Instagram, etc, etc, because I never started with those. (People who organize events: please publicize them on non-social media platforms – setting up your own website is not that difficult!)
I stopped buying Goya products because of the CEO’s nauseating fawning over the former president. A quandry I have is how to deal with companies with a homophobic past who have subsequently edged away from that record–notably Cracker Barrel restaurants and Barilla pasta. Generally I skip them on the basis that there are lots of companies that don’t have such a problematic past.
I agree with everything that’s been said above, but for me a lot of that is so easy. I’ve been been on Facebook because all I see IRL are people having ridiculous feuds over it. I never liked Chik-Fil-A chicken because the sugar brine they use makes the chicken limp and weird-textured, and the fries are limp and tasteless.
As for Amazon; my company hands out gift cards to there once a year, and my experience with it has always been: Order something, Track it as it circles warehouses in Tennessee for a week, watch it ping-pong around the country, and finally get to me 2 weeks later.
Walmart and Hobby Lobby were always like shopping in hell, where a troupe of howler monkeys captures another troupe of howler monkeys and forces them to go shopping.
I try to avoid Amazon if I can, but occasionally that’s not easily feasible. I try to do it the other way around: instead of castigating myself for necessarily shopping at “bad” businesses, I try to put my money where my mouth is and support “good” businesses when I can.
I think I’d draw the line at Tesla. I didn’t grow up atheist in order to convert to the church of Elon.
Wetherspoons.
Yes! And broadly, since brexit, any brexit-exit supporting business / owner. Sadly, this includes Dyson, albeit Dyson was already edging towards my own shite-list do to Mr Dyson’s treatment of his employees (and some qualms about the quality).
sez Some Old Programmer @3: ” A quandry I have is how to deal with companies with a homophobic past who have subsequently edged away from that record–notably Cracker Barrel restaurants and Barilla pasta.”
The way you describe those two companies, they’ve actively worked to get better. I don’t think a problematic/bigoted past is a good reason to regard a company, or a person, as always and forevermore beyond the pale. I mean, they’ve gotten better, yes? This being the case, what reason is there to continue boycotting them?
Basically… I don’t see the quandary you see.
I avoid: Nestlé; all oil & coal companies; all fast-food franchises; Amazon; Uber; Apple; Factsbroke (Facebook / Meta) & Instralies (Instragram); Micro$oft; right-wing media; and starting recently, any owned by Russian or Belarusian interests. (Probably others as well who have slipped my mind at the moment.) My objections tend to fall into a number of reasons: Bad environmental impact; Poor employee treatment (including anti-Union activities); Quackery, pseudo-science, etc.; Unreliability (including lie-amplification); and incompetence.
My list used to include Continental Airlines (due to incompetence), who have since been acquired by United; I have no beef with United per se, albeit I do try to avoid flying due to before-mentioned bad environmental impact. Another was Crocker Bank (incompetence again), since acquired by Wells Fargo (no dealings with them, but I am aware they have engaged in fraudulent activities and so would be included to refuse to deal with them).
Living where I do (village on the Mediterranean coast of S.France) and how I do means avoiding the shite-list is fairly easy. E.g., whilst I can and am licensed to drive, I don’t own a car, so avoiding (direct use of) fossil fuels is easy. I shop local, and prefer locally-produced / sourced goods, so avoiding the big brands is easy (albeit I have accidentally purchased a Nestlé product once every few years). There’s little reason to use Uber in this small village; I run Linux on a custom-specified / built computer; my mobile is a Freephone running Android; etc., etc., etc. I’ve recycled starting about high school (last millennium); but have only recently started focusing on sustainability. I also tend to acquire “discards”; e.g., excepting the current computer and paper-shredder (and books on the bookshelves), essentially everything here at my desk — including my desk & chair — were unwanted items either found on the street or from previous rentals (all taken with permission).
And no, not everything thing is Ok-ish: As one example, some investments are dubious.
Cubist @7: Yes, they’ve publicly moved away from prior homophobic positions. In the case of Cracker Barrel (from what I recall) it took years, and some shareholder activism. So there’s an element of being dragged out of the past. Did they address the harm they caused–not as far as I can tell. Queer employees that were fired under the prior policy got nothing. Failing better information (e.g. vetting by the HRC might get me there), I am skeptical of press releases trumpeting “all better now!”.
For me it’s Amazon, Walmart, Chidk-fil-a, and Disney. Disney funneled money into political lobbying to vastly extend copyright. What’s especially egregious is that if the laws they bought were in effect when they were formed, Disney wouldn’t even exist. They wouldn’t have had any stories to tell. And their brief stint with Steamboat Willie as a trademark solely to keep it out of the public domain proves even that wasn’t enough for them.
I don’t have too many problems avoiding any of those. I almost never need something from Amazon, maybe once every few years. Walmart and Chick-fil-a have other stores that do similar things. And Disney has walled itself off now, so out of sight out of mind.
Oh, and Sony. Almost forgot them because they’re also easy to avoid. I don’t support incompetent clowns and there’s no other way to describe their rootkit fiasco, the failed removal mechanisms that were eventually replaced by methods from other unrelated sources who were more competent, and the bungled way they handled customer data that left their databases open to repeated online hacking a bit after that.
Hey, let’s not forget about AT&T. Top executives seem to be the prime movers behind OAN.