Any reasons are fine, whether being treated like crap or political beliefs.
Yes! With a passion. I can't go in there with my GF because we'll be fighting by the time we leave. The people, the lines, the desperation in the air. Nope.
Fair enough. But at what cost? Walmart is everything I hate about us in bright fluorescence. Always low prices on your very soul.
I worked there for over three years. I'm intimately familiar with how awful they are but driving to three stores that might be miles apart, also big boxes too in almost every case, isn't really doing anyone any good except maybe some feelings of moral superiority on my part.
I've been in a Walmart three times and only once have I purchased something. What a horrible place.
Walmart is a bad store with bad policies. Grocery store culture is almost a thing where I live, and that's because of one word: Wegmans.
I try to stay away from Nestle because I fit the left wing stereotype so well that its embarrassing.
and that one time their CEO said that water being a public right an "extreme" opinion, and that it should be privatised: http://themindunleashed.org/2014/05/nestle-ceo-water-human-right-privatized-2.html It's not as bad as it sounds (he caveats is later), but It's a pretty ugly position. http://www.nestle.com/aboutus/ask-nestle/answers/nestle-chairman-peter-brabeck-letmathe-believes-water-is-a-human-right
That and other corporate sins. They are a company that repeatedly does offensive things. The latest is repeated statements by the CEO that all water should be privately held and that it's immoral if water isn't sold at a profit. There are more than enough substitutes for low end commodity chocolate why give this company your money.
Chick-Fil-A - They actively fund anti-gay foundations. I cannot abide that. If I can buy it just about anywhere else, I will avoid Walmart and, to a lesser extent, Target. They treat their workers very poorly and abuse the incredibly low minimum wage in the US. What kind of company puts together food drives for their employees instead of just giving them a raise so they can afford to eat? Walmart. Some people boycott Starbucks because "Big coffee, etc", but they're pretty legit with how they treat the environment and their employees.
Zara and co. - biggest amount of child workers Soda Club - Israeli company that produces in the West Bank, I do not support the occupation Amazon - They do pretty shitty stuff in Germany. They don't pay their workers well and have their seat in the netherlands, thereby using a loophole in the european law that allows them to only pay 3% tax to the country they work in (for example, they only pay 3% tax instead of 17% (?) as they are supposed to)
Tommy Hilfiger, for it's avid racism towards black and asian people wearing his clothes.
I wish I could say I boycott Tim Hortons. But I still buy it on occasion. However, I have really stuck it to them hard by buying a good travel thermos. I would always buy a medium coffee every shift. So maybe 125-150 coffees a year from them? none in the last 9 months thanks to my thermos. I did get a gift card and have been using it, and I do like timbits. I am really bad at boycotting.
Any chain pizza store, because as a general rule of thumb, pizza from local places is better. And after being raised on local pizza places, I simply can't eat chain pizza.
My biggest hate probably goes to KFC, McDonald's (not giving a fuck about cruel treatment of animals, promoting unhealthy lifestyle to children and simply selling shitty food), Apple, Microsoft (both trying to monopolize many parts of IT industry and in case of Apple organizing some kind of massive cult for their electronic devices). Google has also shown on my black list recently, as I removed my Gmail, YouTube accounts and started using DuckDuckGo as my search engine. The amount of information and power they have nowadays is immense and I somehow don't trust them. In general, when buying, I try to avoid big companies and buy from smaller, ideally local, ones. That is often more expensive, but from my experience the products you get are often of better quality and so it may pay off (at least partially) in the long run.
My only quarrel with Google is how they have changed YouTube, arguably for the worse. The Google+ comment integration is a very, very bad policy and the ContentID changes are also bad, because even using a few seconds of footage from another party registered to this system not only means that you cannot monetize your video at all, but also that ads will still be running on your video and the copyright holders registered on ContentID will get the full income. This has even allowed a lot of copyright trolls to cheat the system and instantly claim revenue from videos they are not supposed to claim revenue from.
Apple - I used to prefer OS X. Three Macbooks in a row. But I got sick of them competing in the courtroom. Sony - stopped buying from them when they shipped music CDs with viruses in 2005. Still haven't forgiven them for that.
For me, it would have to be: TotalBiscuit - Because he's a very rude, uptight asshole to his fans, and he's even been rude to me personally on Reddit, Twitch and Twitter in the past, often without me actually doing anything to provoke him. Pertemps - In short, they headhunted my recently updated CV and offered me the chance to go for a £16k salary customer service job, and expected me to either spend £90 on a train/bus commute to attend an interview between two night shifts which I couldn't reschedule, or withdraw my application. Because I wanted this job, I went. Unsurprisingly, I didn't get the job because I was significantly sleep-deprived, fatigued from a three hour commute, inexperienced, ill-prepared and somewhat nervous, and had to compete with about 20 others who had years of customer support experience. It wasn't even that which was why I won't do business with them now, but rather how callously they handled the rejection by phone and just rudely brushed me aside like I meant less than nothing to them. Reed - I only use their website for finding work because it's genuinely the best around, but I would never use them as a recruitment agency given how much unwanted spam I actually receive from their recruiters. It's so bad, I've almost considered reporting them to a spam watchdog.
Oh my God fuck TotalBiscuit actually. There was a thread about him on Reddit recently, and people were telling him that they hope his cancer kills him and stuff. Which is horrible to do. In fact, one user explicitly said "No one should ever be told to succumb to cancer and die." Which is true. It's also HILARIOUS because Totalbiscuit did exactly that four years ago. Of course his response when this was said back to him was "oh man, what did you do to make me say that to you," which actually makes me mad unlike most internet responses. And of course, when this is brought up on reddit the response immediately become "well what's the context, we need to see that!" But I thought you just said that no one should be told to succumb to cancer. Beyond that he supports gamergate and is a huge hypocrite that is only a "games journalist" (HAH) when it benefits him, but he isn't one when people start bringing up evidence about that. tl;dr: gamergate sucks, twitter is toxic, don't make cancer jokes, games are stupid.
My hands are tied when it comes to Gamergate, actually. I've seen people get doxxed and swatted on both sides of the debate, and I really hate the harassment directed towards Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian. Also, there's that smartass post TB made on SomethingAwful where he proclaimed that he was, and I quote, a "23 year old Law graduate with an IQ of 155." I did mention the whole 'get cancer and die' thing too before I edited it out of my last comment, but that wasn't a personal reason I stopped watching TB's videos or following anything to do with him. My dispute with him was before I was even aware of the cancer incident.
Are personal boycotts worth it? I'm conflicted about them. On the one hand, you get to keep the moral high ground and know that none of your money supports unethical behaviour. On the other hand, it doesn't matter one bit to, say, Wal-mart if I shop there or not. If it's part of an organized movement to shame the company into changing, then it's a different story. If it's just on an individual level, I'm not so sure.
As a side note, if you believe in personal boycotts, where should you draw the line? If you don't want to support, say, Mel Gibson, and don't want him to get any of your money, should you cancel your Netflix subscription? If you don't want to support Microsoft, should you also boycott any companies that rely on their software? Is there an organization too big to boycott? EDIT: On re-reading, I think this post sounds kind of dickish, though it's not meant to. I've always had kind of a strange approach to morality, and I've been through phases of my life where the cancelling Netflix example would have made perfect sense to me. The questions are genuine, because they're ones I've never been able to answer to my own satisfaction.
I tend to agree. But everyone's got their few causes. I can't think of anything I actively boycott. I am absolutely sure that everyone in this thread regularly uses products which come from companies who have done worse things than those mentioned (Coke, hey) -- so I think it's more a matter of a combination of convenience and morality. Which is great, no problem there. I avoid all sorts of things, but not for moral reasons; self-centered ones.