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?
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.
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…
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.
- 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]
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.
Damn, I used to like their crunch corners.
Samsung. For a bunch of reasons, but I think the main starter of it was when I learnt this story.
Amazon. I don’t think I need to explain why on this site.
Obviously both of these are near impossible to avoid completely. Samsung makes the internals of far more products than they put their name on, and AWS runs a big percentage of the web. But I avoid their store, Prime, and Audible.
Completely agree on both points. I actually use a Samsung phone, and it’s been nothing but a privacy nightmare. I’m planning to switch as soon as I’ve saved up enough to afford it.
Yeah, Amazon is a mess. I personally avoid anything even tangentially related to them. I’ve noticed that they tend to be lower quality with worse privacy than the alternatives, and their only benefit is price. Even then, Audible is a ripoff on a massive scale.
Even then, Audible is a ripoff on a massive scale
The thing is, from a customer perspective, Audible is such a great deal. It’s too good a deal, really. They desperately throw out free or cheap months to people who are trying to quit (offers to get them to stay), or who have quit quite some time ago (offers trying to convince them to return). That’s a great deal for customers.
The problem is that they’re such a massive ripoff to authors. They have some extremely anticompetitive policies that make it difficult to put your audiobooks anywhere else if you want to also be on Audible. And I think they are really harsh towards authors if a reader takes advantage of Audible’s very over-generous returns policy. (No-questions-asked return merely if you say you didn’t like a book, even if you listened to the entire thing.)
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.
Shopify has kind of saved the day there, making it easier for individual companies to set up a web presence easily. Personally I like shopping from sites who do that
Nestle
Whatsapp is difficult for me to avoid, but I’ve been pulling it off for years now.
Honestly here in the NL it’s almost as if people see it as some sort of government institution. We have neighborhood watches on there and they openly display the logo as a form of security measure. Honestly it’s kinda creepy that that kinda stuff flows through their opaque servers and software.
I’d prefer an open and distributed protocol, with the largest node being government run. You can’t avoid such large nodes, so it’s better if they are run by a centralized democratic system. Aka @gmail.com, Lemmy.ml, mastadon.social (did I get that right?)
This is always so shocking to me as an American where not many people use Whatsapp. I wouldn’t doubt if snapchat is more common than Whatsapp in the states.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I avoid Western Digital hard drives after their two recent issues:
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In 2020, they silently started selling SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives as NAS drives, without labeling them as such, even though they’re not appropriate for use in a NAS. They can get very slow and cause issues during RAID rebuilds. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use-slow-smr-tech
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In 2023, they started flagging drives with a warning just because they had been powered on for three years (26,280 hours), even if all the SMART data was fine. The “fix” was updating systems like Synology to totally ignore WD’s alerting (WDDA) and only use SMART. I think the warnings are still present, but NAS software just ignores them now. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/
Both were intentional changes to try and increase profits.
I’m using Seagate Exos drives, which are the same price or even cheaper than WD Red Pro drives, when on sale.
Huh, I didn’t know about that. I only bought mine because they were the only ones the store offered, but I guess I’ll try to find another brand when it comes time to replace them. I’ve been meaning to get a new NAS sometime anyway, so that’s a good excuse as any to do so.
Their drives are good quality and work well. I just don’t want to give them any money after they intentionally misled customers :)
I’m in the USA and bought two brand new Seagate Exos “X20” 20TB drives for around $250 each last year. One from Newegg and one from ServerPartDeals. Normal price is over $350, but I’m sure they’ll be on sale again at some point.
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Cemex/Cemusa, they buy all the cement Mexico which due to international pressure has no ability to tariff it or anything then sell it back to Mexicans at extremely high prices so Mexico, which is the Saudi Arabia of cement, is filled with half built buildings because no one can afford fucking cement.
Any brands that make devices that plug into mains power that aren’t UL or ETL certified. I’ve seen way too many cases where people buy generic smart switches with no certification and they trip the circuit breaker or catch fire due to poor quality construction. Certification isn’t perfect, but it’s way better than products not being certified.
I don’t think I’ve ever checked, but I can get behind that. I’d rather not die because a company decided to cut corners.
As a Britbong, I’m always proud of not only BS1363 and the safety it has brung us over the years but the fact that I know that number off the top of my head.
I usually have a goldfish memory for things like that.
Nestlé, Amazon, Coca Cola, Mars & its associates, Mondelez (“Kraft” for the 'muricans). I try to avoid basically any corporation greedy enough to go against human rights in the name of profits.
But where will you get your super processed food?
Coke. Assassinating union leaders is not something I can stomache.
CocaCola did what?? Why didn’t I know that? Guess I’m a pepsi guy now, wow.
Pepsi is literally no better. They do all the same shit and are in bed with Putin
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.
Metallica. I will never listen to one of their songs legally, if I can help it. File sharing shouldn’t be a crime.