I have one that is a true, local boycott. There is a dairy in the Chicagoland area that has been around since my childhood. They have proliferated over the past 10-15 years with ice cream stores all over the place in the area. Their owner decided to make a few runs for political office. His main platform was illegal immigration and pretty much outed himself as a POS racist scumbag. After a few failures, he finally made it as a State Senator.
Even though the ice cream is really good, our family has chosen to not support his businesses. We call it Racist Ice Cream\Milk. If it’s free, like at a friend’s house, so be it. But we won’t give the man a dime of our money. I have way too many friends\family of my wife’s who have immigrated and are hard working, decent people to abide his crap.
I’d bet dollars to donuts that he has knowingly hired illegal immigrants in his businesses. I think he is a lot like Trump. Maybe he believes it, maybe he is just selling it because he thought it would get him votes. Either way, he is an asshole.
Our local JC Pennys drove me to boycott when the cashier insisted I should apply for a JCP credit card and receive a discount. I refused repeatedly and she kept explaining why I just had to do it her way. When I finally told her to just shut up and take my cash, she left a clip on a pair of jeans and I had to return to have it removed. I swore I’d never shop there again, and the store later closed down.
The local Walgreens because of their minute clinic.
I had a bad cold, my insurance pays for the visit, so I went in for them to tell me which version of Mucinex to take. The nurse practitioner told me I needed zinc and some other homeopathic crap they sold. When I gave her the WTF face, she told me to stop being so close-minded. Will not ever go back.
A local ice cream chain in the Sacramento area were major contributors to the anti-gay Proposition 8 campaign several years ago. I haven’t gone there since then.
I boycott an auto dealer where a service center rep lied in my face about what needed repaired on my car. And he got caught. Badly. He got a little cocky with what he thought he could get away with. I reported him to his manager and informed said manager that I will never use their services again and I will leave a negative review and I will advise everyone I know not to go there. The manager said he completely understood, he’d deal with the rep and if he were me, he’d be pissed too. My suspicion is the manager was not quite as “surprised” as he led on to learn that his reps were lying about needed repairs.
There is a large chain of gas station/convenience stores in central Indiana. They use a member’s card discount for their gas. To be a member, one must apply for the card by submitting much personal info including one’s bank account info. Their card amounts to a debit card usable at their stores only. I don’t like the idea of a gas station having that much of my info, so I never buy gas there. They also play weekly games with gas prices, usually causing the prices in their sphere of influence to be higher than the surrounding areas.
I switched over to a really friendly family-owned pharmacy after my CVS hired a petty tyrant as pharmacy manager. He was a straight-up rude and imperious asshole, the final straw for me was delaying a fill for Percocet for no good reason but he wanted to do so – yeah, dude, I’ve copped 60 percs over the last six months for herniated discs, major addict here. My doc, who had also written the scrip for the previous 30, tore him a new one over that. Though my family pharmacy isn’t as convenient, they are efficient, kind and don’t regard customers as the enemy.
Actually, the very last straw was seeing him treat a little old lady like dirt and making her cry in front of a bunch of waiting customers. Someone in line called CVS customer service and another got the store manager. I didn’t stay for the outcome, but that was my last visit to that pharmacy.
I have to say I enjoyed the part of your story, Jennshark, where the other customers got involved in defending the lady being abused. I hope we will see more of that sort of thing instead of the apathy that often seems to sweep over people. Is it possible that some of us have gotten sickened enough by the rudeness engendered by the orange menace that we’re beginning to stand up against it? We can only hope.
A local dry cleaning chain… not only do I boycott them, I also let other people know about my experience there. I took a braided area rug in to be cleaned; the kid on duty gave me a verbal quote for the cleaning (massive mistake there on my part, I now realize), so I happily dropped the rug off and went to pick it up later in the week. At the time of pickup, I was given a price a couple of hundred dollars higher than what I had been quoted. The rug wasn’t heavily soiled or stained, but it had been in a high-traffic area for about ten years and just needed to be cleaned! I brought this to the attention of a manager, who was incredibly snippy and dismissive about the whole thing. And, with no written quote, I had nothing backing me up. I still didn’t appreciate the way I was treated though.
If I ever find myself in need of a Ford dealer (which was actually likely at one point), I would drive to Raleigh instead of dealing with the one in town, which tends to spew heavy Christian messages in its commercials during Easter and Christmas. I personally find this off-putting…are you trying to sell me a car, or sell me your religion?
On the topic of national chains, I boycott Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby for reasons already mentioned. The Hobby Lobby boycott has resulted in me purchasing craft items from small businesses in other states, so that’s a plus for someone’s “buy local” movement.
There is a local excavator who screwed up the installation of our septic tank. He denied it was his work that failed. I hired another excavator and they were able to show it was indeed the original guy’s work that was done improperly. He still denied it.
So, ever since I tell local people about what happened. I’ve actually gotten to be a bit of a bore about it, sometimes repeating the story to someone who has already heard it. I know I’ve cost the guy some money, as he has left an angry voicemail threatening legal action. Bring it on!!!
A local take-and-bake pizza place includes instructions for cooking their pizza. One of the printed instructions was “Say grace and thank the Lord for your meal.”
Haven’t bought since; should have taken the one I did get back and told them that my God told me I couldn’t eat it.
I was quite impressed with my fellow humans as well. I think it’s quite possible that others in line had also been treated like shit by Pharm Tyrant before and witnessing him bully a sweet octogenarian to tears was the “oh hell noes” situation that spurred action.
The CVS is located in a majority Af-Am neighborhood and there were times I wondered if Tyrant acted like an angry, suspicious DEA agent because he thought black customers were more likely to be drug seekers/have fake scrips/be working the system – there was an unpleasant whiff of racism in the way he treated some customers (the elderly woman he bullied was black). OTOH, I’m white, have workplace insurance coverage, my scrips were from a prestigious spine specialist in Princeton, and he treated me like shit as well, so maybe he’s just an equal opportunity asshole.
I need to stalk that CVS and see if he’s still employed there.
Pharm Tyrant may also be the type of person who treats Medicaid patients poorly, something I had zero tolerance for when I worked in retail. :mad: People who do things like that are usually, like you said, equal opportunity assholes on top of it, and karma sometimes bites them in the a$$ too.
I wish I liked chicken so that my boycott of them would actually mean anything. But, really it was their chicken sandwiches that made me despise chicken, long before I ever heard of the CEO’s regressive actions.
We also avoid his establishments. Great ice cream, but I haven’t been there in 10 years or so. I’ll never eat one his hamburgers, either. One of his pet causes has caused major headaches for me, personally. I agree that he’s like Trump in that he has a lot of money, so he must know more about anything than anyone else. Just an awful, condescending, ignorant asshole.
I boycott a fly shop because of posts that the owner made on Facebook. I never would have seen them, but I’m FB friends with one of his FB friends. They were posts of racist memes about Obama. I commented that I’ll never spend a dime in his shop and I’ll make sure everyone knows about these posts. The posts instantly disappeared.