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.
Which app? Is it on f-droid?
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear with my reply. I haven’t actually found an app that does this kind of thing very well, just yet. My reply was more in the line of “I wish I had an app to do this, because searching the internet takes forever”.
Some brief searching came up nowhere when I went looking a few hours ago. I did find two apps on Google Play that seemed like they might work, but both had their own blend of issues, and neither was on f-droid, unfortunately. They were “No Thanks” and “Boycott X”, if you want to try them out.
I used to use one called “buycott”, but it seems like that was abandoned years ago.
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Fair enough. I’ve never been, don’t much like coffee, and I can’t say I ever plan to go there. They don’t sound like the most pleasant of places to relax in.
Even if you like coffee, they make absolute shit coffee. Go to a local coffee place instead. I like my Vietnamese coffee, so any Vietnamese coffee place will give me much better cup.
i wish the vietnamese places here did sugar free. every time i ask, they act like i grew a new eye right in front of them; but sugar might as well be poison for a diabetic old fart like me.
The defining feature of Vietnamese coffee is sweetened, condensed milk. Personally I don’t think I’ve seen sugar-free condensed milk. Not sure how you could make it.
Personally I don’t think I’ve seen sugar-free condensed milk. Not sure how you could make it.
it’s everywhere except vietnamese coffee places.
I guess coconut milk would work. For dairy milk though unsweetened≠sugar free. Looks like there are plenty of unsweetened condensed milks, but I don’t see any that are sugar free. Gotta get rid of the lactose for that.
Oh, the starbucks “thing” isn’t even coffee. You’re not losing anything by not going.
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.
My work forced a recent macbook pro on me. One of those with the ARM chip.
I am in awe of the quality of that macbook.It’s certainly one of those things where I love to hate on Apple but some things they do, they do very well.
Exactamundo! That’s why snapdragon is playing catch-up LOL
I was trying to get on the list at mt work when I got a hardware refresh this year, I dislike large laptops and the dev spec is a 17" thinkpad (which imo has the left CTL and fn keys backwards, breaks muscle memory when changing between computers) but I’m docked most times but when I’m not the battery is terrible, maybe a handful of hours. Probably due to corporate crapware, but at least the arm macbooks stand a chance, my partner has an m1 mbp and she doesn’t bother charging it most workdays or work with it plugged in, she doesn’t need to. We were playing factorio the other night and she was moonlighting into her desktop, she got through a day’s work, a bunch of hours of game streaming and some of the next work day, that should be the expectation for a normal device.
Apple in my view really understood mobile devices, they had the hands down best trackpad for a long time, a fantastic keyboard, great display, a form factor you can actually carry around and as far as I recall, even the intel macs had better battery life.
It’s very hard to argue against Apple hardware and battery life. Maybe with windows moving slowly toward ARM they’ll catch up some. It’s going to be very tough though - Apple has full control over their hardware, which meat they can optimize their OS for it.
I’m in the exact same situation, however the right shift key broke, and activates randomly. This laptop only ever moved between a cupboard and a desk, without the tiniest bump, but after a couple months of very light use the shift key breaks. I now have to have sticky keys enabled permanently.
Also the only way to enable sticky keys on the login screen is to triple click the power button. You would thing they could just put a button for the accessibility accessibility menu next to the one for the keyboard layout switcher, but no.
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)
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
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 …
So god damn good too
They did a limited run of copycat chocolates as a fuck you to the other makers, and they were so much better than the originals. Especially their Twix and snickers.
The toblerone one is incredible!
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.
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
The chain’s owners regularly donate to anti-LGBT organizations. They used to do it through company donations, but after being called out for it they stopped donating through the CFA corporation, but still donate privately to the same organizations.
Good enough for me, I’ll avoid them in the future.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.)
If I may ask, what are you switching to? cause in terms of privacy (without sacrificing usability and other important factors) the phone market looks like a hot pile of garbage. Well I guess FairPhones exist and they’re about as good as you can get but still runs android.
Not entirely sure yet. I do know that whatever I get, I’ll be installing Linux on it instead of android. I might try out one of those de-googled android copies, but I’m not sure.
I’ve got my eye on the rugged survival phone market though. They seem to have different priorities than everyone else, and it seems to really improve the quality of the phones. I haven’t yet found anything that exactly matches my personal requirements though, and most of them are unpopular enough that Linux support is unlikely to ever happen.
Overall, I’ll probobly have to settle for something less than optimal.
Ok so this still sacrifices usability for me
Holy shit I hadn’t heard that story, that makes my blood boil. I would have contacted my embassy and turned that shit into an international incident. Also isn’t paying for someone’s flight in and refusing to let them fly back home some kind of trafficking charge?
Anyway, I guess it’s easy for me to say because I could at worst afford to pay for my flight home in a pinch.
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.
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
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.
When I first started using external drives I always used WD. I had two fail on me. Switched to sea gate and the one drive I got is still kicking. Will never use WD again.
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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.
For sure: fuck them, but this sounds more like a government corruption issue, laws should be in place to prevent businesses doing scummy monopolistic shit like this.
It is right next to the United States and they operate their military on the border and own all the politicians and businesses in Mexico. This is like telling an abused wife it is her fault for not standing up for herself.
Isn’t it owned by Cemex which is a Mexican company?
All of the Cemex board members are American institutional investors. Cemex operates as a mafia in Mexico for the profit of American oligarchs. Cemusa was the old name of a parent company which was folded into Cemex, I’m old.
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?
I agree with your list, but I also have to point out the irony of throwing in a “for the 'muricans” in reference to an American multinational company.
