What brands do you avoid at all cost? I don’t keep up with the news all that much, and many of the reasons to avoid something don’t make it there anyway. So I’m asking here to make a big list of things to avoid. It could be anything from bad security practices to really frustrating packaging. Working as a cashier myself, I definitely know there are plenty of brands I avoid purely on the basis that their product is a pain to stock.
On the flip side, what’s the alternative? If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?
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Obligatory: fuck Nestle
Fair enough. They’re so big I need an app just to keep track of if something’s made by them or not.
Tesla. Elon is proving to be a consummate billionaire scumbag and I don’t want to be associated with him.
This one is very simple given how expensive those toy cars are…
Scumbag is a very polite way to describe him
Apple.
I refuse to pay a premium for locked-down proprietary hardware solely because it looks more visually pleasing than an alternative that performs better.
Tell that to my 2014 MacBook Pro that is still going strong. I can do CAD and video editing and the thing still performs fine. Battery life decreased a bit but still lasts way more than enough.
and the new Apple chip ones are also ridiculous. I have one for work, and was able to leave my computer closed in my backpack for several hour running code training an ML model. The thing did not even get warm and the battery went down by 2% only.
That being said, I think the best computer is the one that works for YOU. In my previous job I was forced to use windows and boy did I suffer! Even Office felt clunkier on windows than Mac.
I can understand people find Apple stuff outrageously expensive and locked down, but come on have some justice on its performance.
I have a dual boot Win/Linux PC with Ryzen 5800x, and an MBP M2 Pro laptop. MBP blows my PC out of the water for my job, which requires hundreds of layers of audio running bazillions of DSPs in real time. Even renders take 30% less time on M2 on my case. And that’s happening on battery.
I never get that much optimized power on my PC. I have to disagree there’s anything out there that performs better for a user just want to have the job done in a reasonable time.
I really hope the snapdragon x laptops gain some traction. I recently went laptop shopping and what I wanted (good to great display, stays cold, good battery life) line up really well with a MacBook/MB air. I just couldn’t stomach the stupid mark-ups for memory and storage. I wound up with a Lenovo 7x slim. Upgrading to 32 GB memory and 1 TB storage was around $115. The non-emulated performance on windows is solid. Emulated is generally ok for my usage. I’m probably going to try Linux on it when I have a light week, but I’m somewhat wary of the impact that will have on battery life.
From what I’ve heard the Snapdragon chips aren’t that impressive though?
That was absolutely the case until very recently. Qualcomm bought Nuvia, a start-up that was stacked with former Apple engineers, a few years ago. These processors are just now coming to market. Laptops with these processors are benchmarking around MacBook levels (slightly behind single core, slightly ahead in multi core).
Ah okay, thanks for the insight!
There’s more to it than looks…
Then pay a premium for the privacy, which Apple actually tries to give you (unlike Google)
I gave up trying to maintain a principled list of companies because globalization and supply chains make it too hard to really find a single asshole.
Your chocolate was picked by slaves. Your clothes were almost certainly made by exploited workers. Does that toy have a lithium ion battery? You’re not going to like how many of the raw materials were extracted. The name of the company on the sticker of the shit you bought is just a small piece of the rot.
The saying “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is pretty true for most of us right now. The oligopoly we have going on makes it extremely difficult to consistently do the right thing. The only real way forward is to regulate the shit out of these products. If only we had another Upton Sinclair to scare the general populace into giving enough of a shit to demand unilateral action.
You can’t even vote with your wallet because like 10 companies own 90% of everything, keeping track of who owns what is a full time job on its own, and all of them are criminals.
Welcome to capitalist feudalism. Not long before it’s identical to the old feudalism.
Tony’s Chocolate …
My chocolate is fair trade actually. You can find good options. Although, yeah, I’d probably struggle re clothing
After spending some time volunteering in Ukraine I concluded that probably the best option to ethically buy clothes might just be to buy the Made in UA clothes from Ukrainian local stores tbh.
Walmart and Sam’s Club.
You know you’re probably dealing with the baddies when the Criticism and Controversy section of your main article on Wikipedia grows to the point where it links to another Criticism of Walmart main article.
For some companies, I wish they didn’t name it “criticisms” or “controversies”; it could literally just be “crimes”. Like Chiquita fruit funding death squads isn’t really controversial. Same thing with child slavery for chocolate companies.
chik-fil-a…
Huh, haven’t heard that one before. What did they do?
I’ve never been to one, so continuing that isn’t much of a bother to me anyway
- Nestle (not easy because the branding is not always obvious, but once you have it memorized it’s no problem)
- Tesla (easy because the cars are shit anyways)
- Müller (Luxembourg dairy product company that has close ties to the German fascist party AfD. Relatively easy but they do have some subbrands that are not obvious) [EDIT: more info]
I don’t want to ask this, excuse I like my yoghurt, but can you tell me more about the Muller-AfD link?
The owner of the company is regularly meeting with Alice Weidel (one of the lead members) and says openly that he is interested in her party’s political views.
Well, I can live without yoghurt
You can still buy it from other companies though. Gotta pick the least bad ones.
Do you have a link to the story about Müller and connection to AFD, im asking because i didnt know that.
Here is one https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/mueller-milch-milliardaer-afd-weidel-treffen-100.html
It was in the news beginning of this year.
Thank you.
I’ve been boycotting muller for a while kow because they had the most obnoxious ad imaginable and this was before I couldn’t take it any more and went for blockers.
Although I must admit part of me hopes that if we ever do go full cyberpunk that there will be a huge müller pyramid full of cows.
Nestle.
I mean, lots of them. But I have a personal vendetta against Amazon. I worked at two companies for a few months, which supplied to Amazon among others, and it was just ridiculous how similar and bad their experiences with Amazon were.
At both companies, whenever we had to stock a delivery to Amazon, we had to use these brand-new pallets, which looked like you could break a toothpick out of them and it’d be sanitary.
Why did we not use old pallets? Because even though Amazon demands all the products to be packaged individually (so they can send them out to customers directly), if even just a handful of the packages get damaged during transport, they will send the whole truck load back at your cost.
And the asshats would take our brand-new pallets, then send back old-ass pallets, which we were then forced to use for all our non-shit customers.
No one at these companies wanted to work with Amazon. It was just that a significant amount of orders came from there, because of people like you and me using Amazon. So, I decided to not do that.
Do you have a recommendation for me as an online shopper?
During the pandemic, lots of offline shops built up a web shop, so that’s where I order most stuff. Often enough, just opening up a map and looking at the shops near you, can already give you an idea. I’ll also just do web searches for a product and see if any specialty, offline-first or manufacturer shops show up.
What also often works, is to look on big aggregator platforms like Amazon, Ebay, Etsy etc., but when you’ve found a product, then look if that brand/manufacturer has an own web store, or again via web search, if there’s any other smaller stores also selling that same product. If you do that a few times, you’ll usually find decent stores where it’s worth looking at their other products, too.
That’s kind of also what I actually like about doing this: Anyone can sell any crap or scam on Amazon et al and since you can’t look at it for real, it’s difficult to tell what’s garbage and what’s not.
These specialty/offline-first/manufacturer shops usually have a reputation/customers to lose, so they generally only sell stuff with a minimum of quality.Also, if you order multiple products, you don’t get a bazillion different packages delivered, but often rather just one, with all products combined.
Jimmy John’s
The owner has been photographed with big game “trophies” of elephants and a leopard.
TW: deceased animals
This guy pisses me off so much. Hunting like this (where it’s private land, the staff do all the work of finding you a prize, & they basically point you at the endangered animal when it’s time to pull the trigger) is so obscene, grotesque, unnecessary, and self-fellating. Fuck this dude in particular.
Completely inexcusable. How people can get away with this kind of behaviour is beyond me.
Question: how is it different than the atrocities against animals most people participate in every day?
It’s okay to have this kind of kindness and passion for all animals, you know.
Did you just “all lives matter” me? I do care about all animals, but hunting species that are barely clinging to existence is the topic of assholery in my post.
Samsung appliances or Samsung smart anything. SSDs are tolerable but I’d rather find someone else.
HP printers but they are especially bad so all HP.
Any device that requires a cloud connection, account, or specific app to work. Hard no.
I have a home PC with motherboard issues that is my multimedia machine. I played around on IBM networks when I was a kid. Fuck printers. And yeah fuck this forced cloud shit. I remember this was a thread.
Nodding my head with samsung. HP comes up and I’m ohhhh how did I forget them!
I find they do slip by you unless you’re thinking of printers. I’m trying to remind myself in more situations. I doubt I’ll ever want an HP computer with or without the reminder but I’d like to make sure.
Most of Nestlé, of Lactalis…
Oh yeah fuck Nestle.
Coke. Assassinating union leaders is not something I can stomache.
Müller (Unternehmensgruppe Theo Müller), an unscrupulous European food company with ties to the radical right. There are plenty of alternatives, including regional ones.
Müller owns numerous prominent brands, especially in Germany and the UK, but also in other countries.
Thanks for raising awareness about this
