What's your list of banned brands?

SethranKada@lemmy.ca to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 175 points –

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 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.

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.