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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...
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.
Do you have a link to the story about Müller and connection to AFD, im asking because i didnt know that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I avoid Western Digital hard drives after their two recent issues:
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Metallica. I will never listen to one of their songs legally, if I can help it. File sharing shouldn't be a crime.
Nestle, Microsoft, Reddit, Roku, Meta, X, Google (as much as possible). I would boycott so many of them if it was possible, but I particularly avoid those because I especially hate them.
Most fashion clothing brands.
The additional expenditure rarely maps to better quality.
And if they make watches too, don't buy those. They are always the cheapest watches with a name stamped on.
Yeah, pretty much anything luxury. I make a point to buy knockoffs if I need the same class of product, because I know I'm paying a premium for intangible marketing bullshit otherwise.
Literally all of them. Any big company is doing evil things, and I doubt there is an exception to that rule. Shop local, grocery shop at a co-op, eat local, prioritize products you know are actually made in your home country. Most importantly; just buy less. Repair the things you own, take care of them, borrow from friends. Never buy something "surprisingly cheap".
KwikFit fucked me over once 15 years ago and I'm never going back.
Apple is BS for losers.
Someone driving a Tesla I can't help but think of them sucking off Musk whilst being ass fucked.
I avoid anything from iSSrael, Russia or China as much as I can, also anything related to Elon Musk
LG, Nestlé, Coke-Cola, Amazon, TikTok, Temu, any big brand bank, ASUS, Johnson Outdoors brands (jetboil, scuba pro)
Edit:forgot Tyson foods and Hormel. Their fucking over chicken farmers.
EA got my account stolen with 1200+ hours of playtime via fraudulent support tickets. That's why, I am not touching anything EA's involved with ever when they absolutely suck at account security.
Crowdstrike
Microsoft
Honestly.. Google Play.. someone re-gifted my son a $20 Google Play card a few years ago, and I tried to buy something for him and realised the card was about 2weeks out of date, and after about 10 back and forwards with support, they wouldn’t honour it.. a trillion dollar company. I get it, but their cold indifference just seemed mean
I try to avoid all the brands that still work in russia because I don't want to fund the terrorist state
McDonald's.
I'm not much into fast food but if I'm craving a burger and chips I'll get it from a pub.
Nestle
HP
Apple
Tesla
There are more but those are the first that came to mind that I don't have to go dig up a list.
Microsoft and Lenovo
There's a bunch I know when I see them, but not many I can think of right on the spot. Apple, Liquid Death, and Celestial Seasonings are a few I can think of though. Apple for a million reasons; LD because I just find their whole campaign insanely obnoxious and everywhere I look and I hate that people are paying ridiculous prices for plane ass water in a can; Celestial Seasonings because it's straight up an actual cult.
Amazon: I avoid them because of worker abuse and union busting. While prime shipping is convenient, planning around not having it comes pretty naturally. Just plan as if it’s not an option at all. This does require good internet search skills to find sites that sell what you’re looking for, but I can’t express how worth it the work is to get better quality products.
Starbucks: I avoid them because of union busting. I make most of my coffee and tea at home, it’s cheaper and better anyway. Otherwise, I go to a local cafe. My area has a lot of them, but even if yours doesn’t, try asking around.
Friggin' Spirit Airlines!