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?
at&t, comcast, tobacco co’s
I try to avoid all the brands that still work in russia because I don’t want to fund the terrorist state
Obligatory: fuck Nestle
I avoid anything from iSSrael, Russia or China as much as I can, also anything related to Elon Musk
I try and not support many corporate brands, and buy local produce and meats.
It’s easier to avoid problem companies by not buying any of the millions of cheap snack foods that are basically just repackaged corn syrup and starches.
- 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok so this still sacrifices usability for me
