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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Obligatory: fuck Nestle

Fair enough. They're so big I need an app just to keep track of if something's made by them or not.

Which app? Is it on f-droid?

Sorry, I wasn't very clear with my reply. I haven't actually found an app that does this kind of thing very well, just yet. My reply was more in the line of ā€œI wish I had an app to do this, because searching the internet takes foreverā€.

Some brief searching came up nowhere when I went looking a few hours ago. I did find two apps on Google Play that seemed like they might work, but both had their own blend of issues, and neither was on f-droid, unfortunately. They were "No Thanks" and "Boycott X", if you want to try them out.

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.

It's certainly one of those things where I love to hate on Apple but some things they do, they do very well.

Exactamundo! That's why snapdragon is playing catch-up LOL

I was trying to get on the list at mt work when I got a hardware refresh this year, I dislike large laptops and the dev spec is a 17" thinkpad (which imo has the left CTL and fn keys backwards, breaks muscle memory when changing between computers) but I'm docked most times but when I'm not the battery is terrible, maybe a handful of hours. Probably due to corporate crapware, but at least the arm macbooks stand a chance, my partner has an m1 mbp and she doesn't bother charging it most workdays or work with it plugged in, she doesn't need to. We were playing factorio the other night and she was moonlighting into her desktop, she got through a day's work, a bunch of hours of game streaming and some of the next work day, that should be the expectation for a normal device.

Apple in my view really understood mobile devices, they had the hands down best trackpad for a long time, a fantastic keyboard, great display, a form factor you can actually carry around and as far as I recall, even the intel macs had better battery life.

It's very hard to argue against Apple hardware and battery life. Maybe with windows moving slowly toward ARM they'll catch up some. It's going to be very tough though - Apple has full control over their hardware, which meat they can optimize their OS for it.

I'm in the exact same situation, however the right shift key broke, and activates randomly. This laptop only ever moved between a cupboard and a desk, without the tiniest bump, but after a couple months of very light use the shift key breaks. I now have to have sticky keys enabled permanently.

Also the only way to enable sticky keys on the login screen is to triple click the power button. You would thing they could just put a button for the accessibility accessibility menu next to the one for the keyboard layout switcher, but no.

Tell that to my 2014 MacBook Pro that is still going strong. I can do CAD and video editing and the thing still performs fine. Battery life decreased a bit but still lasts way more than enough.

and the new Apple chip ones are also ridiculous. I have one for work, and was able to leave my computer closed in my backpack for several hour running code training an ML model. The thing did not even get warm and the battery went down by 2% only.

That being said, I think the best computer is the one that works for YOU. In my previous job I was forced to use windows and boy did I suffer! Even Office felt clunkier on windows than Mac.

I can understand people find Apple stuff outrageously expensive and locked down, but come on have some justice on its performance.

I have a dual boot Win/Linux PC with Ryzen 5800x, and an MBP M2 Pro laptop. MBP blows my PC out of the water for my job, which requires hundreds of layers of audio running bazillions of DSPs in real time. Even renders take 30% less time on M2 on my case. And thatā€™s happening on battery.

I never get that much optimized power on my PC. I have to disagree thereā€™s anything out there that performs better for a user just want to have the job done in a reasonable time.

I really hope the snapdragon x laptops gain some traction. I recently went laptop shopping and what I wanted (good to great display, stays cold, good battery life) line up really well with a MacBook/MB air. I just couldn't stomach the stupid mark-ups for memory and storage. I wound up with a Lenovo 7x slim. Upgrading to 32 GB memory and 1 TB storage was around $115. The non-emulated performance on windows is solid. Emulated is generally ok for my usage. I'm probably going to try Linux on it when I have a light week, but I'm somewhat wary of the impact that will have on battery life.

From what I've heard the Snapdragon chips aren't that impressive though?

Then pay a premium for the privacy, which Apple actually tries to give you (unlike Google)

Tesla. Elon is proving to be a consummate billionaire scumbag and I don't want to be associated with him.

This one is very simple given how expensive those toy cars are...

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? Youā€™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.

chik-fil-aā€¦

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.

Walmart and Samā€™s Club.

You know youā€™re probably dealing with the baddies when the Criticism and Controversy section of your main article on Wikipedia grows to the point where it links to another Criticism of Walmart main article.

For some companies, I wish they didn't name it "criticisms" or "controversies"; it could literally just be "crimes". Like Chiquita fruit funding death squads isn't really controversial. Same thing with child slavery for chocolate companies.

  • Nestle (not easy because the branding is not always obvious, but once you have it memorized itā€™s no problem)
  • Tesla (easy because the cars are shit anyways)
  • MĆ¼ller (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 don't want to ask this, excuse I like my yoghurt, but can you tell me more about the Muller-AfD link?

The owner of the company is regularly meeting with Alice Weidel (one of the lead members) and says openly that he is interested in her partyā€™s political views.

I've been boycotting muller for a while kow because they had the most obnoxious ad imaginable and this was before I couldn't take it any more and went for blockers.

Although I must admit part of me hopes that if we ever do go full cyberpunk that there will be a huge mĆ¼ller pyramid full of cows.

1000012897

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

I mean, lots of them. But I have a personal vendetta against Amazon. I worked at two companies for a few months, which supplied to Amazon among others, and it was just ridiculous how similar and bad their experiences with Amazon were.

At both companies, whenever we had to stock a delivery to Amazon, we had to use these brand-new pallets, which looked like you could break a toothpick out of them and it'd be sanitary.

Why did we not use old pallets? Because even though Amazon demands all the products to be packaged individually (so they can send them out to customers directly), if even just a handful of the packages get damaged during transport, they will send the whole truck load back at your cost.

And the asshats would take our brand-new pallets, then send back old-ass pallets, which we were then forced to use for all our non-shit customers.

No one at these companies wanted to work with Amazon. It was just that a significant amount of orders came from there, because of people like you and me using Amazon. So, I decided to not do that.

Do you have a recommendation for me as an online shopper?

During the pandemic, lots of offline shops built up a web shop, so that's where I order most stuff. Often enough, just opening up a map and looking at the shops near you, can already give you an idea. I'll also just do web searches for a product and see if any specialty, offline-first or manufacturer shops show up.

What also often works, is to look on big aggregator platforms like Amazon, Ebay, Etsy etc., but when you've found a product, then look if that brand/manufacturer has an own web store, or again via web search, if there's any other smaller stores also selling that same product. If you do that a few times, you'll usually find decent stores where it's worth looking at their other products, too.

That's kind of also what I actually like about doing this: Anyone can sell any crap or scam on Amazon et al and since you can't look at it for real, it's difficult to tell what's garbage and what's not.
These specialty/offline-first/manufacturer shops usually have a reputation/customers to lose, so they generally only sell stuff with a minimum of quality.

Also, if you order multiple products, you don't get a bazillion different packages delivered, but often rather just one, with all products combined.

Shopify has kind of saved the day there, making it easier for individual companies to set up a web presence easily. Personally I like shopping from sites who do that

This might be an unpopular opinion but I avoid Western Digital hard drives after their two recent issues:

Both were intentional changes to try and increase profits.

I'm using Seagate Exos drives, which are the same price or even cheaper than WD Red Pro drives, when on sale.

Huh, I didn't know about that. I only bought mine because they were the only ones the store offered, but I guess I'll try to find another brand when it comes time to replace them. I've been meaning to get a new NAS sometime anyway, so that's a good excuse as any to do so.

Their drives are good quality and work well. I just don't want to give them any money after they intentionally misled customers :)

I'm in the USA and bought two brand new Seagate Exos "X20" 20TB drives for around $250 each last year. One from Newegg and one from ServerPartDeals. Normal price is over $350, but I'm sure they'll be on sale again at some point.

When I first started using external drives I always used WD. I had two fail on me. Switched to sea gate and the one drive I got is still kicking. Will never use WD again.

NestlƩ, Amazon, Coca Cola, Mars & its associates, Mondelez ("Kraft" for the 'muricans). I try to avoid basically any corporation greedy enough to go against human rights in the name of profits.

I agree with your list, but I also have to point out the irony of throwing in a "for the 'muricans" in reference to an American multinational company.

Jimmy John's

The owner has been photographed with big game "trophies" of elephants and a leopard.

TW: deceased animals

Snopes fact check: true

This guy pisses me off so much. Hunting like this (where it's private land, the staff do all the work of finding you a prize, & they basically point you at the endangered animal when it's time to pull the trigger) is so obscene, grotesque, unnecessary, and self-fellating. Fuck this dude in particular.

It's okay to have this kind of kindness and passion for all animals, you know.

Did you just "all lives matter" me? I do care about all animals, but hunting species that are barely clinging to existence is the topic of assholery in my post.

Any brands that make devices that plug into mains power that aren't UL or ETL certified. I've seen way too many cases where people buy generic smart switches with no certification and they trip the circuit breaker or catch fire due to poor quality construction. Certification isn't perfect, but it's way better than products not being certified.

I don't think I've ever checked, but I can get behind that. I'd rather not die because a company decided to cut corners.

The awesome thing is that those marks can be counterfeit and you only know by looking up the number.

Oh yeah, that's the other thing I forgot to mention. Make sure the mark is legit.

In general, branded products that are an actual brand (not some Amazon special) and have good reviews should be okay.

As a Britbong, I'm always proud of not only BS1363 and the safety it has brung us over the years but the fact that I know that number off the top of my head.

I usually have a goldfish memory for things like that.

I assume you mean the fused plugs thing?
In Aus we dont have those but we do have mandated all lighting & GPO circuits to be on RCD/RCBOs so thats reassuring. (Unless you have an old house that is grandfathered in and no works have been done requiring the replacement or upgrade of your switchboard since the laws came in)

Yeah, we've got something I recall being called the P-laws or something brought in, meaning all new sockets need to be a certain height above floor level.

I've seen many rented houses here that still have them on the floor since older builds ain't required to rectify them. Scary if you see all the recent flooding we've been having in some parts of the country :/

But those three pin / fused BS 1363 whilst been one of the safest sockets you can get, I can confirm they're an absolute bastard if you stand on one.

Samsung appliances or Samsung smart anything. SSDs are tolerable but I'd rather find someone else.

HP printers but they are especially bad so all HP.

Any device that requires a cloud connection, account, or specific app to work. Hard no.

I have a home PC with motherboard issues that is my multimedia machine. I played around on IBM networks when I was a kid. Fuck printers. And yeah fuck this forced cloud shit. I remember this was a thread.

Nodding my head with samsung. HP comes up and I'm ohhhh how did I forget them!

I find they do slip by you unless you're thinking of printers. I'm trying to remind myself in more situations. I doubt I'll ever want an HP computer with or without the reminder but I'd like to make sure.

Whatsapp is difficult for me to avoid, but I've been pulling it off for years now.

Honestly here in the NL it's almost as if people see it as some sort of government institution. We have neighborhood watches on there and they openly display the logo as a form of security measure. Honestly it's kinda creepy that that kinda stuff flows through their opaque servers and software.

I'd prefer an open and distributed protocol, with the largest node being government run. You can't avoid such large nodes, so it's better if they are run by a centralized democratic system. Aka @gmail.com, Lemmy.ml, mastadon.social (did I get that right?)

This is always so shocking to me as an American where not many people use Whatsapp. I wouldn't doubt if snapchat is more common than Whatsapp in the states.

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.

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.

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 better quality but not flashy doesn't count. Nobody is impressed I'm wearing GAP instead of Walmart.

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.

Literally all of them. Any big company is doing evil things, and I doubt there is an exception to that rule. Shop local, grocery shop at a co-op, eat local, prioritize products you know are actually made in your home country. Most importantly; just buy less. Repair the things you own, take care of them, borrow from friends. Never buy something "surprisingly cheap".

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Samsung; just a lot of general very anti-consumer behaviour.

LG; a "do not sell my data" option on a TV that's turned off as standard? No, thanks.

ASUS; has become pretty unreliable in my experience and their RMA shenanigans haven't helped.

Apple; overpriced and anti-consumer, I wouldn't mind getting a MacBook as a gift or something, though...

HP; cheap garbage that's obsolete the moment you buy it and becomes e-waste after the warranty has expired. Their business line is marginally better but there are far better options out there.

Huawei; see above.

NestlƩ; do I really have to explain? They're pretty much the worst company to ever exist.

Spotify; endless price-hikes to enable the CEO to buy more soccer teams and firearm manufacturer shares, pay artists almost nothing per stream, disabled their car thing after two years, lied about Spotify Hi-Fi....

Oh you can add so much more on Apples entry. For a fun read, I suggest doing a web search for 'Apple anti-suicide nets'. Apple and nestlƩ are among the top of my list for companies I morally cannot support due to human exploitation.

I'd like to know the alternatives, especially for Samsung, I still think it is the best smart phone company

Motorola for phones. Does everything you need with a near AOSP android. Affordable too. good official support, and good community support with lineageos

This might be a bit controversial, as Google is obviously also known for their fair share of not so good stuff but I really like their Pixel line of devices. Especially for that stock android experience (doesn't Samsung even pre-install TikTok nowadays?). Sony phones are also pretty decent from my experience.

As for laptops, the business lines of both Dell (Latitude & Precision) and Lenovo (ThinkPad) are pretty solid. Especially Dell's support is just amazing, I deal with them regularly at work and they've been really great.

As for ASUS; I haven't had to buy a mainboard in a while but I heard some good things about Gigabyte.

Tidal is a pretty good alternative to Spotify; I think they pay artists the most per stream out of all music streaming services, they offer true Hi-Fi quality for the same price Spotify charges for their base tier and they even upgraded all Hi-Fi members to Hi-Fi Plus for free recently.

NestlƩ is a big enough campany that you just have to live with not buying their products I guess... Although there are pretty good alternatives for stuff like frozen pizza (Dr. Oetker is pretty good if that's available where you live) and chocolate (Tony's Chocolonely ftw).

I was asking only about the technology stuff actually so huge thanks, mom likes NestlƩ's milk for some reason, me not, their products are always of higher price even water.
I keep hearing good things about the pixel, but the problem is that Google doesn't make that much phones, while Samsung has devices for every price (As, Js, Ss, ...etc) and even if you're screwed it's not like Wiko (traume intensifies). I don't hate TikTok specifically but yeah I hate bloatware on my devices, I used to have even Youtube and Chrome uninstalled back when I had a smart phone (J4+ was my brother's choice for me)

Budget phones aren't really worth it when you can get a flagship from 3 years ago (with most likely better specs) for about the same price IMO. Sure, updates are a problem but if you're willing to tinker around a bit it's doable.

Ugh god... Tech brands, off the top of my head:

  • Asus (Scammers)
  • Lenovo (Fuck lenovobios, bad hardware quality past 2010 or so)
  • Sager (Scammed me by selling a laptop with too high power draw that resulted in crashes)
  • Microsoft (Mega spyware corp, bad software, worst OS on the planet)
  • Apple (Likely spyware corp, Bad locked down devices, anti right to repair, overpriced)
  • Google (Biggest Baddest spyware company, monopoly on many platforms)
  • Nvidia (Extremely hostile to open source, will likely never work on OpenBSD unless Nvidia seriously changes their stance; even then there's so much bad faith at this point I wouldn't trust them)
  • Meta/Facebook (Mega spyware corp, zuck is a lizard)
  • Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams, proprietary software ecosystem that won't work on my phone)
  • All major phone manufacturers (Android sucks, iOS sucks harder)
  • Pine64 (Charging circuit is software controlled for some insane reason, supports Manjaro)
  • All major smart TVs (spyware, always-on microphones, locked down OS with ad-ridden clients)

Okay companies:

  • Valve (Still hosts a shitty DRM platform, but it's the best one; only listing because the Steam Deck is awesome)
  • Framework (Pro user repair, good hardware, no complaints; look forward to RISC-V board)

So, uh, how do you live in modern society?

Framework laptop with OpenBSD for prod, Steam Deck for gaming, Pinephone with pmOS for phone stuff (even though I put Pine64 on the bad list, if I could buy again I would have tried the Fairphone or other pmOS compatible device instead); self host everything possible (mail, git (got), gitweb (gotweb), http, ipsec vpn) on a cheap VPS running OpenBSD. It's comfy.

Why openBSD though?

Good documentation, good in-house servers, correctness, secure defaults.

Fair enough, what's software/hardware support like in general?

https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

All the x86 hardware I've tried at least boots. Suspend/other acpi stuff can be a problem, as well as wireless card support. Intel devices are the best supported at the moment by iw*(4) drivers.

Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams)

Cars less reliable than ICE, despite having a fraction of the parts. Absolutely proprietary and probably going to start enshittifying over the air at some point. Still some degree of expense-adding hype.

Pine64 is not one I expected to see dissed on Lemmy. I can't say I'm impressed with the one I bought, though, and it has some kind of electrical issue that would be a pain to fix. It's too bad, I love the concept of OS phone hardware.

Pine64 is definitely tenuously on the list, I simply can't recommend a device thats status as a bomb depends on what kernel you put on it (and theo forbid an attacker manages to get access to the circuit).

Let me give you a complaint for Framework: apparently they were having a hard time releasing bios updates in a timely manner (as in, they were over a year late iirc) which pissed a lot of people off.a

A colleague of mine bought a framework and is always complaining about it. Says he wish he'd got a thinkpad again.

Framework sounds great in theory, but it's hard to justify nearly double the cost compared to a Lenovo T-series.

Sony, for all sort of reasons (the rootkit and other DRM, pushing proprietary formats like MemoryStick and ATRAC3, removing OtherOS (a.k.a. Linux) support from the Playstation, etc.).

Blizzard, because of Freecraft and BNetD (I was boycotting them long before they merged with Activision).

Ideally, I would boycott Nestle and the other abusive agri-conglomerates, but honestly probably a lot of their products slip through because (a) it's hard to tell what's made by who because of all the subsidiary brands, and (b) with all the consolidation, pretty much everything is made by some shitty megacorp these days. I mean yeah, if I eschewed normal chain stores entirely and tried to buy everything from local small businesses or something then I guess I could avoid them, but ain't nobody got time (or money!) for that.

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 interesting. Iā€™m not American so I didnā€™t know it was banned. My subscription ended not too long ago and I didnā€™t renew cause I felt it was useless anyways

  1. Apple
  2. Meta (but actually it effectively avoids me, I not much avoid it)
  3. Nazi states (the new axis powers) affiliated brands when I can, especially for the tech companies.

If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?

Tea, probably.

Apple for their poisonous followership.

Canon for being assholes.

Microsoft for their shitty products that only survive due to the mass they have acquired during the years running largely unchecked.

Facebook/Meta/Twitterx/Tesla: see Apple.

What's wrong with Canon specifically? The rest I am already aware of their sketchy dealings.

Usually Canons camera selection is quite good, was there a scandal or is it just shit support for their printers or help in general?

Canon printers. Back in the time, I bought a large canon printer - for 60cm wide paper, with large ink tanks on the side. It cost a rather substantial amount, but printing under Linux was meh, as there was no special driver for this model. I asked for a manual so I could write such a driver myself, but their position (back then, I never bothered to recheck) that Linux and open source in general was theft of intellectual property.

Not really answering the question but I've completely stopped buying anything that requires USB micro B. I can't fucking stand that connector. USB C costs a negligible amount more and I've yet to have a single port or cable fail irreparably after using it for the best part of a decade.

An actual answer to the question? I'm done with Microsoft and Nvidia. I'd love to add Google to the list but I'm still largely entrenched in their ecosystem.

Honestly.. Google Play.. someone re-gifted my son a $20 Google Play card a few years ago, and I tried to buy something for him and realised the card was about 2weeks out of date, and after about 10 back and forwards with support, they wouldnā€™t honour it.. a trillion dollar company. I get it, but their cold indifference just seemed mean

They didn't become a trillion dollar company by being nice. No mega Corp earns their billions by being an honorable company

I thought it was illegal basically everywhere to have gift cards go out of date? Scumbags.

LG, NestlƩ, 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.

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.

EA got my account stolen with 1200+ hours of playtime via fraudulent support tickets. That's why, I am not touching anything EA's involved with ever when they absolutely suck at account security.

KwikFit fucked me over once 15 years ago and I'm never going back.

Apple is BS for losers.

Someone driving a Tesla I can't help but think of them sucking off Musk whilst being ass fucked.

McDonald's.

I'm not much into fast food but if I'm craving a burger and chips I'll get it from a pub.

It's cheaper too, over here at least. I need to pay 18 euros to get what I want, and it isn't uncommon to be treated disrespectfully.

Whereas a really good fish and chips is like 11 euros here and you can have a fun little chat with the owner or whatever.

It used to be cheaper. Nowadays you'll spend the same amount of money at McDonald's as the pub.

Amazon: I avoid them because of worker abuse and union busting. While prime shipping is convenient, planning around not having it comes pretty naturally. Just plan as if itā€™s not an option at all. This does require good internet search skills to find sites that sell what youā€™re looking for, but I canā€™t express how worth it the work is to get better quality products.

Starbucks: I avoid them because of union busting. I make most of my coffee and tea at home, itā€™s cheaper and better anyway. Otherwise, I go to a local cafe. My area has a lot of them, but even if yours doesnā€™t, try asking around.

Many store-brand foods because they're made with half garbage.

HP - their printers and subscription models pissed me off so much that I want nothing to do with them.

Apple - 'nuff said

Dollar, Hertz and Thrifty car rental. Also Budget, but for different reasons.

Never use Dollar, Hertz or Thrifty under any circumstances unless you want to be fucked. Never prepay with Budget unless you want to be fucked.

Can confirm, got fucked by Hertz last time I rented a car. Whoā€™s your go to?

I truly do not know. I was using Budget, my truck was in the shop and two days' rental was going to be $142. Two hours after reserving it my mechanic tells me he's going to have me done today - so I cancel the reservation.

Because I chose "pay now" rather than "pay later", I'm charged a $150 cancellation fee on a $142 rental (the fee posted on the website - $50 - is not for "prepaid" "same day" cancellations - not that the website told me this anywhere obvious, of course).

So I literally would have done better financially to drive the fucking thing around for two days for no good reason.

Protesting to customer service gets me a resounding "go fuck yourself."

I'm now open to suggestions, I was using Budget because they had the best prices of what remained to me, but never again.

Damn. Iā€™d have tried a chargeback, especially if their site is incorrect or misleading (idk how recently this was). Itā€™s damn near impossible to see who actually has the best prices because you canā€™t tell what anything really costs until they tack on all the horse shit fees after returning the car.

Hertz left me stranded in Austin TX last time I was there. Rented a car for a week. They let me think I had a car until the morning of my reservation, when it was an hour before pickup to notify me that "sorry we're cancelling you". I had no other options, every other place in town was out of cars. Most said I needed a reservation and I had to think to myself how stupid it was.

I spent over 500 in Ubers on that trip going stupidly long distances.

As soon as I was home I dropped my Hertz membership and joined Enterprise. They cost a bit more but I have never been treated that way. Hertz/Dollar/Thrifty are all pretty much the same, so I'll never use them again.

Dollar, Thrifty and Hertz are all the same company now. They intentionally overbook. I don't know the exact reason why, short of naked profiteering and not giving a fuck.

The last time I rented with them (initially Dollar) I booked several months beforehand and when I got up to their kiosks, I ended up getting one of the last cars that they had on hand. I know I got one of the last because as I was waiting (for hours), they first closed the Dollar storefront, then they closed the Thrifty storefront - funneling everybody into one line ultimately ending up at the Hertz storefront. Shortly after I got up to the desk and they were finally giving me my paperwork and keys, they began to shut down the Hertz storefront. At this point there were still literally more than a hundred people standing in line (it was a holiday). So closing up left a whole bunch of people carless and very, very angry. So even waiting for hours through this bullshit, I was one of the LUCKY ONES.

I booked the car online at the extortionate price of $800 for a week, but ever since the pandemic, rentals have been overly expensive so whatever. Subsequently, they proceeded to apply every possible extra to the rental, without my knowledge. Extra insurance, top tier insurance, full tank of gas, roadside assistance - everything - all of which are also at inflated prices. Not until I got home did I notice that the actual cost of this rental was going to be almost $1500, TWICE THE FEE I HAD BOOKED ONLINE. I had no choice but to accept it and get on with my driving vacation, but I never forget.

1 more...

HiSense - they make appliances and they're junk

All bottled water - no one needs them and it's plastic that's here forever

Temu - disposable shit

Bath and Body Works - the creators of microbeads (plastic) hand soap

Teflon - poisoned my town's water

Chick-fil-A - evangelist food, no thanks

All bottled water - no one needs them and it's plastic that's here forever

Depends on where you live. It's a bit ignorant to say "no one needs them". Also sometimes you have no choice, like maybe in an airport.

Yes yes, exceptions.

I live in one of the worst cities regarding lead in the drinking water though, thanks to old pipes, but a waterfilter solved all this.

Nestle

HP

Apple

Tesla

There are more but those are the first that came to mind that I don't have to go dig up a list.

I try to avoid all the brands that still work in russia because I don't want to fund the terrorist state

Dell Microsoft Roku Sony Briggs & Stratton Duracell

All of the above companies have failed me for the Last. Time. Admiral Piet. We're done.

MS make a decent mouse as it goes.

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.

There's a bunch I know when I see them, but not many I can think of right on the spot. Apple, Liquid Death, and Celestial Seasonings are a few I can think of though. Apple for a million reasons; LD because I just find their whole campaign insanely obnoxious and everywhere I look and I hate that people are paying ridiculous prices for plane ass water in a can; Celestial Seasonings because it's straight up an actual cult.

Late to the apparent party but Phillip Morris . They own a shitton of food and pot licences.

I avoid Nemix RAM, because the first time I bought a bunch of sticks from them, they had an 18% failure rate. I paid to ship the bad sticks back, and they sent me more bad sticks. Nemix said they worked fine, so I sent them the Memtest screenshot with all the errors. They didnā€™t want to pay shipping to replace them again, so I just returned them and got some Micron RAM, and itā€™s been working perfectly.

Friggin' Spirit Airlines!

Why? Because of quality, service or?

Well, I guess spirit is technically the cheapest. So that might be worth it to people all on its own. But I find the seating to be very cramped, I don't like the feeling of being "nickel and dimed" with their "charge for everything" scheme, and when I rode spirit they would have extremely generous take off and landing estimates so that even with many delays, they are still "on time".

None of this is really malicious, I think they are clear about the fact that they offer cheap tickets for a cheap experience. But man, as a customer, it feels bad. I will just pay the extra money and go with something else.

I do agree with this. Especially with any extra baggage. They overcharge you to the point it's not worth taking it over other airlines if booked prior

Coca-Cola, NestlƩ, Starbucks.

Tesla, Red Bull, Believe Music, Microsoft, Samsung, so many more I canā€™t think of right now

Coca-Cola, Apple, Samsung, HP.

My alternatives are none (water & coffee only), Android (OnePlus specifically for phones), LG/Toshiba for consumer electronics, Brother for printers and Dell or Lenovo for laptops.

Edit: Oh yeah and Tesla, not only because of Musk, I simply don't want to drive a tablet on wheels. I'm going for low-tech cars only. Some barebones Kia, Hyundai or Dacia.

Bad dragon, my tiny rose petal still gets sore on rainy days

Walmart, Amazon, Blizzard, EA, Apple, McDonalds, Then some of the mega brands when I can avoid them like Unilever, General Mills, etc

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

Samsung. & Vodafone. For NZrs: Fisher & Pykel.

F&P quality is shit and the first two have awful customer service. Samsung also, while they do innovate, lack quality and don't stick by their products.

Also: HP and Apple. Shitty lock-in tactics

Hyundai . i will never buy another one again. ever.

seats are hard as rocks. they break down way to fast. the rear view mirror is set way to low in the window creating a safety hazard for looking forward. it needs to be set much higher on the window. (so i have to look up a little to see the mirror... so f'ing what?!) get the damned thing higher so it doesn't block my view when i try to look front and right of the car.

that's just a few of my annoyances with that car. i'm done with that company.

ā˜ļøNote - only applicable in North America

They have virtually zero consumer protection laws so companies can get away with selling utter crap at inflated prices, and so obviously, they do.

Samsung home appliances, Hyundai and Kia cars, TVs with adverts built in (lol) are just a couple of examples of good quality products that have specific models that they only sell in the US because they can get away with it

Perfectly fine to buy them elsewhere

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.

Gillette. Due to their toxic masculinity ad. Why are they talking about that stuff? I went to them for shaving stuff, not for a talk about toxic masculinity or whatever. The good thing about the ad. It got me into safety razors. They're way better then cartridge razors. So thank you, Gillette. For making me stop using cheap plastic razors.

Same here. It got me to try other brands (I used to buy Gillette out of a habit) and all of them turned out to be better and cheaper. In the end - Wilkinson for the win!

Also, you got me to look up what a safety razor is. Looks classy!

Reasonable. Personally, I never learned how to use a razor, so I just use an electric shaver. It doesn't give as good a cut, but I'm happy to contribute to a boycott anyway.

Personally, I never learned how to use a razor

šŸ¤”

Alright. Ima be ur daddy and tell you have to shave in 3 minutes flat.

  • Acquire some BIC single blade razors

  • Head to shower, put it on steaming hot and apply steaming hot water to face. Getting a hot towel after getting out of the shower and leaving it on your face for a while makes a tough shave even moar comfortable.

  • Lather shaving foam all over face

  • Run BIC razor under cold running water and shave until your face is like a baby's bum

  • Rinse thoroughly with cold water to remove all lather

I think the key that they never admit is that none of those disposable razors can really handle anything more than a couple of days growth. If you are someone who doesn't try to stay cleanshaven, but just want to shave once you start to get scruffy, it will never work.

That's where double edge, shavettes, and true straight razors excel.

Very true.

I generally just use my ceramic bladed hair cutter on 0 when I'm not required to have a clean, clean shave, and then like I say above just use a BIC when I need a baby's bum face for work etc.

The twin / triple blades I find can be off-putting to some since if you have too much growth they latch on and snag.

If it's the ad I'm thinking of, I actually kinda liked it. But I definitely agree with you on the safety razors. Better shave and better for the planet. Don't buy plastic cartridge razors, you're getting ripped off and needlessly contributing to the plastic problem. Now if only I could find blades that a 100 pack didn't mean 20 plastic 5-packs of blades, but it still is a lot less waste than a cartridge razor.

Mostly anything USA since I was 12-15 years old. Israeli too since many years ago.

Coca cola, apple, google, Intel CPUs