Due to my job, I am constantly buying new sneakers. Normally, this doesn't sound like a big deal, but I have two qualifications: 1) The appearance of the sneakers can't be some loud garish color; 2) They can't be Nikes. Why not Nikes, you ask? Simple. They endorse Michael Vick, and as such, I have not purchased one sneaker or item from Nike since. Nor will I. Strangely enough, this has presented a problem to me in sneaker buying because I like Nikes, and most other brands hit you over the head with the multicolored monstrosities they offer. I also will not go to Chick-fil-A. I agree, awesome sandwiches, great product, however, I don't like their stance on gay marriage. Let me be clear, I understand that neither Nike or Chick give a fuck about my little boycott. I don't post on Facebook, nor do I encourage others to follow what I do, as what others do is their concern, not mine. I also will never use 'Webuyanycar.com' because I absolutely fucking hate their commercials. Seriously. We have two cars to sell right now, due to my father in law's passing, and the wife mentioned we should consider it. I told her that I was fervently against it. Fuck those guys. Focus: Are there any products that you don't buy for a reason unrelated to the item itself? Does this present any difficulty for you? Would you change your mind if the reason for your 'boycott' was removed? Alt Focus: Do you think boycotts work in general? Any boycott you can remember that forced a change in the way someone did business? Was it fair? NOT Focus: Criticizing others for their choices. This is not that thread. Get personal and I'll get personal and buy you a ticket on the Nope Train to Fuckthatshitville (as so eloquently coined by shimmer - that makes me laugh and laugh every time I see it)
I typically don't buy meat from supermarket chains as I find the treatment of the animals at the mass farms where the meat comes from to be deplorable. It's not a moral stance against the treatment of the animals themselves, but since I'm eating it, I don't want my chickens pumped full of steroids (Do you even lift bro?) or some chemical-rich grains. If I'm shelling out the money I'll buy grass or pure-grain fed poultry or meat. It's more self-serving than anything, but hey. I also don't buy from or donate to businesses or causes that openly support planned parenthood. The organization does a lot of good, but I do not support abortion so I can't support them, but I dont go nuts and protest or anything. In that regard, I on principle do not donate to political campaigns, regardless of stance. I might as well go play blackjack if I'm just going to be flushing it away anyway. Bump.
I refuse to watch any Woody Allen movies. Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I'm not, but I don't think I will ever know.
I refuse to eat Panera because you can get a sandwich with a side of bread. Their bread isn't even that good. It is just ridiculous. I refuse to eat at McDonalds if the McRib isn't currently on the menu. THAT SHIT IS TOO GOOD NOT BE THERE ALL YEAR. I would boycott it all year, but I have an addiction that must be fed.
I've been thinking of replacing the gold chain I use for my necklace. Even though I know nothing of their prices or value I'll likely get a replacement at Continental Diamonds because literally every other jewelry store's commercial is obnoxious as fuck. Erectile Dysfunction commercials also annoy the shit out of me. If were in charge of making them, I'd make them just to fuck with people - I'd show limpy looking all anxious and depressed about his ED and then cut to a shot of his woman fucking some young guy. He'd come home with his prescription with his chest puffed out and ready to go, but it would be too late; wifey's found a better source of cock. If not that I'd make an ED commercial showing a gay couple, because fuck peoples' homophobia. I also avoid Wal-Mart, but that's more because Target is a local company and I try to be loyal to local businesses.
I don't purchase veal or lamb or suckling pig. There is no reason to kill a baby anything for food. I don't care how humane the slaughter is. Eat the adult version it's almost the same. Except in the case of veal, the entire rearing process should be an animal cruelty crime. I don't think it even tastes that good anyway, sure as hell not enough to warrant tethering an animal down so it can't move. Guess what else that veal is doing? Shitting all over itself. Delicious. I'm not big on the market chain meat either. Especially the chicken. We've had this discussion before. Chicken coops are poisonous, covered in shit and piss, the animal is suffering and filthy and DISEASED. I do my best not to buy from them. Prohibitive cost is an issue. See also: high fructose corn syrup. I'm avoiding that crap wherever possible (fuck you, ketchup). I'm around 99% processed food free. If only cheese wasn't $500,000 a pound for the good stuff. If only Campbell's Tomato Soup wasn't soul sucking delicious. I boycott a lot of stuff on incident because I just don't buy certain things. Diamond mines are horrible, however I don't give a shit about buying diamonds or gems. I boycott Walmart, but they don't have anything I want anyway. Same with Nike, Coke, Apple, Chick-Fil-A, McDonald's. Maybe this as another possible Alt Focus could be interesting? I'll tell you what I'm a hypocrite about: fracking. I own stock in several companies thriving off fucking up the environment. HIGH 5! Alt. Focus: From what I've been reading successful boycotts are a crapshoot. Target took a hit, but Chik-Fil-A didn't. Internet has made it much easier to raise massive hell in a short amount of time. Especially with how dramatically indignant people can get over the slightest thing. So, I'd say if you piss enough people off, it will affect your business. At least for a little while until the next thing... Say, how's that BP boycott working out? Still making billions in profits and drilling The Gulf? You don't say.
Focus: Although I do go there on occasion I generally refuse to go to Walmart. In my mind it's the gathering place of the lowest of our society. I hate people to begin with and those places are packed with the most deplorable degenerates. Alt-Focus: Boycotts might get you a little of the attention that you so obviously crave but I don't believe they make any difference in creating any sort of change.
Never Home Depot. I worked there years ago and they only treat their employees even worse now. Plus, they have shit products. Fuck 'em. Trust me, they don't deserve your business.
I play hockey and am a nerd about goalie gear. I know about the latest and greatest, and I know about the changes they've made to their gear over the years and their pricing policies. One of these companies is really reprehensible, its Reebok. Reebok has been using the same design for their goalie gear for the past 10 years, which is lazy, they however haven't forgot to raise their prices every time a new model comes out. They also decided to move their gear production overseas after their last model, which is fine, but they naturally didn't cut the prices. They tried to keep this really quiet and assumed the masses would forget that while they cut costs they didn't pass it on to the customer. Unfortunately it worked. Their marketing is the best and soon enough the parents forgot about this and/or didn't care. And of course the kids want to be wearing the same gear as Carey Price. That guy is a gold mine. I don't buy Reebok because they essentially make an inferior product that is marketed as new, as well their pricing policy pisses me off. Their new goalie skates cost $800, why, because fuck you thats why. They're the most expensive skates on the market and sad thing is kids will demand their parents buy them for them. Reebok's new leg pads cost $1800, more than any other company's comparable product. Why? Because their marketing is good enough. I'd be down to try their gear if the company was more open about how they do business. But no one wants to hear the new model is literally the same as it was 10 years ago, so they'll never change, they have no reason to.
Hobby Lobby, because of their recent hypocritical shenanigans. Abercrombie & Fitch because the skeeviness of the owner and various business practices goes on and on. Neither of these presents a hardship to me, the competitors work perfectly well. Chik-fil-A has been more difficult. For awhile, when it was clear that a % of my dollars given to them went towards anti-gay crap, I only went to them whenever my kid's school was having a fundraiser. Now that they have supposedly ceased giving corporate $$ and it is just the owner's personal money, I will eat there occasionally. I could have my facts incorrect because stuff changes all the time, but whatever. ETA: On a local level, there was a vote last election about whether the sales tax for restaurants would increase by a couple of percentage points in order to fund some school projects. There were some restaurants that campaigned to convince people to vote no on this proposal. Apparently they thought people would stop eating out if they had to pay what amounted to ONE FUCKING DOLLAR MORE for their meal. Fuck those guys, never eating there again.
Mine is with video games. I really hate DRM, I buy my games I dont pirate anymore, but if i am paying for the game I want to be able to play it when i want, I shouldnt have to pirate the game to be able to play it. Fuck Ubisoft, they are one of the worst one for DRM in there games, I will not buy a single one of there games. Fuck EA, I really try to avoid any of there games, I haven't bought any of there games in forever except Titanfall. There new simcity was so bad with DRM that paying customers couldn't even play the game at the begining. They took away two game modes in Titanfall(ctf and pilot hunter) because they say no one was playing them and the few that did were having "long" wait times. There was such backlash that they put ctf back in. There are so many games I want to play that i dont have time, i am not really missing much, so i dont get to play a few games i might want to, i am so far behind it really doesn't bother me.
Is "All of Wall Street" too broad? I'm still livid about the bailouts, so I shut down my BofA account for a credit union, traded my Amex for the credit union's card, moved my money from Ameritrade (public company) to Fidelity (private), and am generally trying to use less of their products. I'd love to not have a mortgage when I buy a house, but we'll see if that's feasible. I consider it as doing my part to starve the beast.
I, along with all other black people stopped wearing/buying Tommy Hilfiger sometime in the early 2000s because of this hoax that he went on Oprah and said something like "If I knew black people would be wearing my clothes, I wouldn't have made them." At this time, Tommy Hilfiger (along with Nautica) was like the nicest clothes black people wore. This was when FUBU/Sean Jean was still young. Now it came out later that it never happened, which is funny because there was never any proof of it happening. It died down for years, but then it came back up about 3-4 years ago and Oprah had have Tommy himself on to squash it. For some reason, even I know beyond a shadow of a doubt its fake, still won't buy it. Now I don't know if that is because of the racism or if I just don't care for the fashion anymore. I think boycotts can work to enact change just not major. But with certain companies what do people really want when a company does/did something they don't like? What would those companies have to do to get those back? Spoiled for possibly off topic/hypothetical question. Spoiler Let's say Nike dropped Michael Vick and doubled whatever money they gave him to PAWS and the Anti-Cruelty Society? Would you be back in VI? Or would they need to also fire the person/people who made the call to sponsor him? Would firing that person/people be enough? Like I wonder what would happen today (let's just say he was still alive) if Steve Jobs came out and said some outlandish shit. He came out and said "1) No one should own guns. 2) Women should stay in the kitchen and only serve their husbands. 3) Gays should not be allowed any rights. 4) Minorities are inferior, including the Jews." Would people just want him fired/banned from Apple? Or would that be enough for people to toss away all of their Apple products and not buy the iPhone 6? *Delete this if it is too off the wall.
I think it all comes down to what people choose to be offended by. Obviously, the last example is crazy. Like with mob mentality before, people tend to get on their high horse to be part of group think and be part of something. I think being offended by something is the same as "liking" something on facebook. Its not really going to change anything. Just like the Duck Dynasty guy. People got all up in arms over it for like 5 minutes, and then moved on. America is an arbitrary rage machine.
To me, a boycott is a personal statement. It's more of a statement of my beliefs than the company's. It keeps me consistent and illustrates that beliefs have to have actions behind them. For example - if you're against livestock conditions in intensive farming, it's hard to take you seriously when you buy the cheapest chicken you can get from the supermarket. It won't have much effect on the supermarket; other people will buy it. But it's a reflection of your beliefs to do it, and it's important to do so because if enough people think like you, they'll have real economic effects. I see it as similar to voting. Your vote by itself means nothing, but it's important because if everyone votes, society will reflect what we desire it to become. What's more is that where your money goes is a far more selective method of shaping society than voting for a certain candidate. You vote every time you spend your money. You vote when you buy beef instead of veal. You vote when you go into a local store instead of Walmart (and inversely, you vote when you go into Walmart instead of a local store). So, what do these companies have to do to get your business back? Whatever you want the standard to be. It can be as lenient or fanatical as you want. You can boycott Walmart until they repaint their store neon green and dress all of their employees in clown suits. All it means is that your opinion goes into the big-ass opinion box that is the economy. If the collected opinions agree on things, companies will have to adapt or go out of business. Of course, some people will have stupid and unreasonable opinions, but most people will have reasonable opinions on a lot of things. Despite all of the snarkiness and snootiness toward the average American, we make relatively good decisions in the aggregate when it comes to what's acceptable and unacceptable in our society. Try running a campaign for your product featuring a guy in blackface, and you'll see how far we've come.
True that. I think people act offended to earn themselves special privilege. And it works, society has pussy-whipped itself into being afraid of offending anybody, and outrage factories with large audiences like twitter and Facebook are stellar nurseries for the temporarily pissed off. They remind me of the meat protesters from PCU flipping their "No Nukes!" picket signs around because that's what outaged them the previous week.
I have a number of places I won't support because of political agendas - Chick-fil-A is one of them. I also stop buying from companies that I feel have unfairly screwed me on customer service/warranty/etc. I had a Cuisinart blender that broke after 2-3 uses, spitting razor-sharp shards of plastic into the drink I was making without my knowing it until, fortunately, we found a chunk prior to drinking any. I logged a warranty request and was essentially told it was clearly my fault. So, Cuisinart no longer receives my business. Similarly, I make a conscious effort to buy from companies that have treated me well. My insurance company will always get my business as long as they have a location near me because they were so amazing during a burglary. I don't have illusions about the power that my individual choice has, but I feel happier supporting good companies and I just hope others do the same.
My wife asked me the same thing about a week ago, as we had to go buy sneakers. I know she would buy Nike if Vick was no longer sponsored, but would I? Great question, I go back and forth, but I think ultimately, I would. I'm not against businesses making money and making business decisions - most of the time. I'm also not judgmental about this sort of thing at all, I think Omegaham's post summarizes it nicely: I do what I do because I believe in it. I'm not interested in convincing or persuading anyone else. It's just what I feel comfortable with. For instance, my wife will eat Chik-Fil-A. Doesn't bother me in the least. We don't argue about it, because there's nothing to argue about. For me, personally, having Nike fire all the people involved wouldn't seem fair. I do miss Nike, as they were my favorite sneakers, both for comfort and look. I'd also like to buy some Nike golf balls again.
Yeah, same here. I have a gay friend who has been consistently going to CFA once a week for breakfast for years. He didn't even break his stride when the news came out about the the owner's activities. He also loves to occasionally "check in" on FB because he thinks it's funny when his friends give him shit for it.
Yup, same here. When Bernie and Arthur sold out to the big corporation, they stopped caring about their employees.