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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I’m a big privacy and FOSS advocate so my list is kinda long, but the main ones are:
-> Google (I use GrapheneOS)
-> TikTok
-> Tesla (too much data collection)
-> Microsoft (self explanatory, however for some things I need to keep an w10 LTSC VM configured)
-> Adobe (same reasons as Michaelsoft)
-> OpenAI (same reasons as Michaelsoft, but I do use it inside a vm in no-account mode for some work related things)
-> Uber (oh man that app is digital herpes)
-> Spotify
-> Facebook/Meta
-> Dropbox
-> Whatsapp
I avoid anything from Israel, Russia or China as much as I can, also anything related to Elon Musk
I bet it’s hard to avoid Chinese products
Mostly anything USA since I was 12-15 years old. Israeli too since many years ago.
Coca cola, apple, google, Intel CPUs
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.
Why ASUS? I used to have one of their routers but aside from that I don’t know much about them.
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.
Apple
Relatable. I’m in a pretty Apple heavy area, so I’m in the minority in my dislike of anything Apple. At least they are easy to avoid, with how obvious they make their branding.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Cemusa, they buy all the fucking cement in my country which is corrupt and has no ability to tarrif it or anything then sell it back to us at extremely high prices so my country, which is the Saudi Arabia of cement, is filled with half built buildings because no one can afford fucking cement. Fuck American corporations
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.
We are 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 abusive 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 here for the profit of American oligarchs. Cemusa was the old name of a parent company which was folded into Cemex, I’m old.
Nestle.
TikTok and Kaspersky.
Why Kaspersky?
Security software from a Russian company. It was recently banned in the US due to its national security concerns.
Oh you really haven’t heard??
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.
Apple & Meta. I try to boycott Amazon in lieu of other online sellers but I don’t always succeed. All non-union Starbucks. The latter is the one that has impacted my life the most because I used to spend my days studying at Starbucks. I Struggle to focus and concentrate on formal work of any kind while at home. We do have two unionized locations in town. They usually don’t have any sitting room left, though because they are so close to the university campus.
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.
Same here regarding fashion brands, except for Duluth Trading for clothing and Ariat and Hoka for shoes. When working out in the elements and walking on concrete all day, I find the extra expense for those brands are worth it for me.
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.
Less than half of them are legit. You want to buy $15 pants 10 times or buy $70 pants once. Budget says $70 is a luxury. So we keep at it. It’s expensive to be poor.
No, I meant “luxury brands”. Buying something slightly better quality but not flashy doesn’t count. Nobody is impressed I’m wearing GAP instead of Walmart.
Most of Nestlé, of Lactalis…
Oh yeah fuck Nestle.
