Asklemmy

Nestle. Boycotting for years.

It made me sad that a ice cream I liked was part of nestle.

At this point, what am I not boycotting? lol

I guess this is the abridged no-go list:

• Nestle (duh)
• BP (still haven't forgiven them for lubricating the Gulf of Mexico and being like "oops, sorry")
• Verizon (injecting tracking IDs into customer web traffic to sell to advertisers while also charging me $60/mo for 2 GB of data -- I'm a product or a customer. I will not be both.)
• RWNJ-owned businesses (Chick-fil-A, In-n-Out, Hobby Lobby, Applebees, etc)
• AT&T (After so many years, I forget exactly why, but they're just evil)
• The entire states of Florida and Texas
• The lottery (I'd have the same payout and more fun just setting the money on fire)
• Microsoft (It's MY computer, not yours)
• Apple (Overpriced hardware, control-freak walled garden, everything needs a damn $29 dongle, etc)
• Reddit, Facebook, Twitter (also blocked in firewall)
• Amazon (except the 2-3 times a year they give me a free month of Prime and I buy all my stuff, take the free 1-2 day shipping and cancel before they bill me)

Late additions:

• Exxon (knew about climate change for over 40 years; spent millions promoting misinformation/denialism)
• Bank of America (used to work there - will never bank there. Oh, you're poor? There's a fee for that - several, actually)

Chick-Fil-A for their support for organizations that are anti-LGBT. Apparently these donations have stopped but I’m stubborn.

nestle. man fuck nestle

Amazon. Fuck Amazon.

Meat, as it's carbon footprint is just too high.

I'm boycotting everything from Nestlé, which can get difficult since that evil octopus of a company has so many goddamn tentacles!

As for boycotts I've ended, I used to boycott the Lotus brand of toilet paper and paper towels because they were made by a Koch Industries subsidiary but then they sold the brand off to a socially and environmentally conscious Swedish company so I started buying them again.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, TikTok. Most people I work with think I'm totally out of touch with reality because I don't use any of the big social media platforms and then they watch the same 12 ads and 3 videos on 5 different apps.

Blizzard. After the Blitzchung incident I uninstalled every one of their games and haven’t played anything Blizzard since.

Once the merger is complete with Microsoft I’ll probably start playing them again.

Reddit - API fiasco, antagonistic, and predictable

Facebook - it's crap

Instagram - popularity contest

WhatsApp - unnecessary

Snapchat - unnecessary

TikTok - Chinese spyware

Microsoft - bloat and privacy

Adobe - expensive and slow

Twitter/X - crap

Elon Musk news - annoying

Oil change places - rip off & untrustworthy

Tire places except for Costco - rip off

Toyota dealerships - shady and deceptive

Apple - expensive and limiting

Netflix - crap

Hulu - crap

Wendy's - crap

KFC - crap

Bottled water - expensive and wasteful

Sodas - terrible for health

Papa Johns - treats employees like shit, crap politics, expensive

Panda Express - generic, local places are better

Pollo Tropical - generic, local places are better

Checking & savings banks - credit unions are much better for their customers

American cars - crap

BMW - for dickheads and too expensive

HOAs - waste of money, too controlling

Autism Speaks - more harmful than good

Susan G Komen - selfish litigators

Better Help - pays their clinicians shit, so you're getting bottom of the barrel therapy

I used to boycott ATI before AMD bought them, because the driver support on Linux was so bad. I got a laptop with a GPU they didn't support until almost a couple years later, and then as soon as it worked, they dropped support because it was too old.

Now they have the open source driver and better GPU support than Nvidia.

I don’t buy Nestle products.

Nothing. I've given up.

I am too small to make a difference, unable to convince others in my life to join, and the companies I want to boycott have grown so big that their brands are everywhere and it's exhausting to try to keep track of them all. Plus, boycotts are pretty ineffective these days. Even in the most extreme cases, companies now know they only have to wait ~2-3 months before the masses stop caring and move on to something else.

Now I just live my life. I support causes I believe in, try to treat everyone I meet with kindness and respect, and do what I can to give myself and my family a happy, comfortable life. That's all I can do, it may not be enough to save the world, but it's enough to save me and those I love

Apple - while their products are undeniably good quality on both HW and SW sides, I hate their business practices, overpriced products (monitor stand for $1k ?!?!?!?!), and being anti right to repair.

Epic Games - partially owned by Tencent (a money hungry Chinese company), PC exclusivity deals, anti consumerism

Elon Musk - nuff said

Andrej Babiš - a Czech politician who used to be in the communist party back in the day (and denies it), a millionaire, a liar, a thief, and in general piece of shit. I will never buy any products made by companies owned by him (sure, they are not "his" per-se, because they can't legally be, but I am sure he still profits from them through money laundering).

Tik Tok - app by the Chinese, with tracking and information gathering throughout, and an ultimate time sink. Stupid trends start there, and it does absolutely nothing for the humanity.

Facebook. Never had an account. In the early days I was afraid id lose job opportunities because something I'd post or others post with me in it, like smoking a bong or maybe just drunken 2am rant.

Now I don't like it cuz it converts sweet old people into Nazis. Among everything else.

The gas station down on the corner. When I first moved here, I went there all the time because it was convenient. Gas, bread, soda, you name it, I would swing through there and pick it up. I stopped every single work morning and got coffee on the way to work. I started bringing my own insulated cup, so they charged me less. Then it was bought by a new owner, and he wanted to charge me more. Okay, it was still cheaper than if I used their cup and more convenient than making it at home - they provide the coffee, sweetener, creamer, and there's no clean up on my part. One day I went in with a new cup that was the same capacity as the old cup. A different shape, but it held the same number of ounces. The owner said, "that cup's bigger, I charge you more." I tried to argue, but he didn't budge, and he charged me the same amount as a large coffee in their cup. Now, I'm not stupid, I've worked in retail before, I know the largest cost to a cup of coffee is the cup, but I paid it, walked out the door, and never set foot in there again. That's been eleven years ago, and I don't plan to go back. I hope the few cents he greedily wanted over coffee was worth all the other lost sales.

Boycotting In N Out for being anti-vax and more recently anti mask. Shame because their burgers are pretty good for the prices they charge.

I recently chose to release my boycott on home Depot. I found that the one of the founders of home Depot was supporting Trump and since I'm anti-trump it doesn't make sense for me to support his supporters you know?

The friend of my enemy is my enemy after all.

But then I looked into it and found that home Depot had actually disavowed association with the guy and intentionally and willfully does not support any presidential candidate.

I'm still boycotting Walmart and Amazon and Chick-fil-A and hobby lobby though. Walmart and Amazon are some of the largest companies in the world and they can afford to pay their employees living wages and they choose not to in the name of greed.

Chick-fil-A and hobby lobby are companies that sell things that people might occasionally like but at the same time they use their profits to support anti-gay and anti-trans and anti-bodily autonomy movements, and even though I'm not affected by any of those three movements, I'm not going to let my money go into the pockets of people who are spending that money on hate.

If I can help it, I try to support local businesses over Walmart, Target, Amazon, or any other near monopolistic retail chain.

Chick-fil-A, and Hobby Lobby. Owners have been vehemently antiqueer and antichoice, and have funded such organizations and politicians through their business.

Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft. Both have been accused of large scale sexual misconduct, and neither company has completely dealt with the issue.

Twitter and Reddit. It's not just that I hate the direction both sites are heading, but I want to fully back and support the open source alternatives that have grown during the migrations of both sites. Besides, Musk has made it to where I can't even lurk on Twitter if I wanted to.

JonTron. He's living proof that as long as you're funny, people will forgive and forget anything. (Look up his history with racism and antivax for those in the latter camp, cause I'm tired of answering the "what he do" question)

The Harry Potter franchise. This one hurt the most because I had just starting to get into the Harry Potter series as the pandemic hit, and I was halfway through Prisoner of Azkaban when Rowling started her campaign against trans people. I Also used respect Rowling a lot because she's a master at world building, and I had gotten into reading Harry Potter cause I wanted to take inspiration from it for my own work.

Ruroni Kenshin, and Nobuhiro Watsuki's other works. I can get why people would forgive JonTron and Rowling to an extent, but defending Nobuhiro's pedophilia is a bridge way tf too far for me.

BP. For their incrediblely bad environment and safety record

Nestle for their baby formula shenanigans

Goya and at&t for their trump support

Any products that support Koch Industries. Horrible people.

Any state that voted for Trump. Especially if they did it twice

I try to boycott as much of Nestle as possible and Tencent

Blizzard/Activision after all the scandals.

Google music after it changed to youtube music and changed all the music I bought and downloaded to a file format that only could play on YouTube music and you had to be online every day to validate your music. Fuck em

Surprised I don't see this one, but slave trade chocolate (which unfortunately is most chocolate).

There are some lists out there, but we try to avoid all chocolate unless we are sure it isn't harvested with slave labour, even partially.

Apple. I wouldn't use their products if they were free.

Roblox. As a parent, I'm not about to support a casino for kids. As a hobbyist game developer, I won't support their exploitation of developers either.

Lotteries. Im not against gambling in general, but I sure am against emotional manipulation, and taking advantage of those who don't understand math.

I'm boycotting too many things to count. I have an entire website where I just list things I think should be boycotted for the sole reason of I hate capitalism

EA, since 2013 when they fucked up sim city.

Inkjet printers are pretty much a scam, and HP is particularly shameless about it. I do not buy anything from HP.

Dell sold me a lemon laptop and it took 6 months for them trying to fix it before I demanded a complete replacement, and they replaced it with a different model with fewer features. I wouldn't buy a Dell if civilization depended on it.

I'm avoiding pretty much any large video game studio. Kinda baffles me that anyone anywhere does business with Activision/Blizzard, EA, Bethesda and the like. They treat their creative staff like shit, they treat their customers like shit. Looking down my list of games bought in the last 10 years, I'm not sure if Unknown Worlds Entertainment (developers of Subnautica) or Coffee Stain Studios (Goat Simulator; Satisfactory) are the largest studio I buy from. Valve themselves don't count per "in the last 10 years."

I avoid Microsoft as much as I can. They're just straight-up bad people and have been since before I was born.

Fast fashion companies

I buy on Amazon only if I got some gift card (because im broke af and those are free money) but never with the fast shipment

Fast foods, Starbucks and similar

Delivery companies like Uber eats or Glovo

Meat

I don’t buy not-reusable products (like toothbrushes, razors, cotton) with a few exceptions, where I can I buy the eco or tech versions

Back around the start of the millennium Napster became a thing and suddenly every song was fair game. I cannot stress how cool it was to be able to find a song and hear it on demand.

I did however feel some guilt about taking songs for free from my favorite bands at the time. So I came up with some ethical standards I could live with. One of them being "If I downloaded more than 3 songs off a single album, I should buy that album." After that I took stock off my mp3 collection and began purchasing CD's to back fill what I'd downloaded.

The first band I started purchasing albums from was Metallica, and then they sued Napster.

I haven't spent a dime on them or listened to their music since. At first it was a conscious decision, but then after a year or so I realized I just didn't care about their music much anymore so it was easy after that.

Chinese products. After living there for a decade, I now actively try and avoid buying products made there—or Chinese companies—at the least.

Reddit obviously. Pretty much any corpo controlled social media in general though. Deleted my FB account about 5-6 years ago and never looked back. Deleted my barely used Twitter account after muskrat took over.

Blizzard. Haven't played a Blizzard game since 2012 ish. I was deployed and would play WoW in my downtime until a major update came out and completely broke me, blizzard was no help in the multiple tickets that I submitted. Tried every fix I could find on the internet at the time. I asked them if they could send me an install disc, I'd even pay for it. Hard no from blizzard. It was clear they didn't care about a long time player like me. That was it for them. Now over the years we have seen all of the scandals and games rampant with microtransactions. I'll never play another one of their games unless I pirate the shit out of it.

I'm becoming increasingly intolerant to all of the tech price increases so I've been ramping up my self hosting capabilities. I just need time which is a hard commodity to come by for me anymore. This is really the only thing preventing me from cancelling Netflix right now because Netflix is easy for my kid to access across devices.

I have wanted to cancel Amazon for months now, but that's a battle I've lost to the wife. She gets everything on there. I've tried the argument that we can just order stuff when we have a cart over $25 for the free shipping. I've mentioned about how many late shipments we've got over the last few months. 2 day shipping has become a straight lie at this point. We don't watch Amazon prime video at all.

Nestlé, wherever I can. They are a particularly evil multinational corporation.

Also won't work for companies that profit on human misery.

Microsoft, Apple, anything Nestle, Meat products that don't tell you where the animal was raised and claim it's origin is domestic (too often bs). Pet food from the big global players.

Semi-boycotting digital stores like Epic Games and Ubisoft. I already have Steam and GOG and I don't wan't any more bloatware or their launchers on my system. Plus others don't seem to give a shit about Linux players.

Coke, for assassinating union organizers.

Not a 100% boycott, but I try my best to minimize interest and interaction unless it's the absolute last resort:

• Nintendo
• Disney
• Reddit
• Imgur

Sony - When the ps3 came out it had the OtherOS feature that allowed users to install Linux. This was the main reason I bought a PS3 instead of other systems. From the beginning, it turned out that Sony crippled the OtherOS by restricting resources that were available to it.

After a few years, they removed the OtherOS feature, because someone hacked it, which could possibly lead to pirating ps3 games.

They sold me a PS3 based on a specific feature and then disabled that feature. I will never knowingly buy a Sony product again.

Sweatshop clothes. Except for show merch but as most shows I go to are punk shows, they're usually pretty good about ethically sourced merch.

My longest ongoing boycott is Nestle. I've probably bought a Nestle product by accident at some point or another, but if I see the logo or know it's a sub brand it's a no go. My newest boycott is LTT/LMG (Linus Media Group).

I left Reddit but I'm not sure if I would qualify that as boycotting. I don't browse there but I still use the search terms for niche information like I did in the past. Reading this thread I see a lot of boycotts that I agree with, but I wouldn't qualify as my own since I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary. Take Hobby Lobby, I've never had cause to go there so I've never gone there. If I had cause to go there, I would find an alternative but it's not like I'm actively going out of my way like I do to ignore Nestle products.

I still get Chick-fil-A occasionally, it's one thing I feel guilty about. Not often mind you, like once every few months, but growing up I had fun memories there with people I won't be able to make new memories with, so I find it comforting.