About a year ago, I stopped buying Levi’s, after Levi’s being my preferred brand of jeans my entire life.
The reason: Levi’s music division came out in favor of gun registration, a position I adamantly oppose. I wrote them and told them why I was no longer buying their products, and they sent me a note saying that it was in tune with their “corporate conscience” to take the stance they did. Sorry, bub, you’re outta luck.
Anyway, in the time since then I have bought or tried on every other brand of men’s jeans on the market. None of them are close to fitting me as comfortably or well as Levi’s.
I think I may have found a solution I can live with. I’ll still buy Levi’s, take the brand identifiers off and send a matching amount of cash to Brassroots or Second Amendment for Everyone to offset what Levi’s makes from me.
Have any of you ever run into a consumer ethics problem like this? How did you handle it?
Not quite such an ideal to fight for, but I had been boycotting Tower Records for a personal offense against me.
Last year, there was a deal online where people could sign up for accounts with flooze.com and get this online currency which Tower accepts. I did, and used it to buy two cds.
Unfortunately, two other guys at my University (and in the same residential college, too) took advantage of the deal by creating multiple accounts, which was specifically forbidden. They got about $200 and about $1000 of merchandise from Tower, respectively.
Until Tower’s lawyers called Rice and had them disable our user accounts and ethernet ports. For 3 weeks, while Rice’s lawyers did battle with them. As a computer science student, this was of course, extremely inconvenient for me. Especially since I had a rather large project due during this time. Fortunately, the prof was understanding. But I wasn’t too keen on doing business with Tower anymore. (The other two guys had to sign agreements saying they wouldn’t!).
Anyway, cut to a few days ago, when I’m browsing online looking to buy Cowboy Bebop dvds. Tower has the best prices, by a considerable margin. So I gave in, and bought them there. Of course, I used online coupons to lower the price by an additional %15, so hopefully they’re losing money on it anyway. 