Really ? You pass up good food because of the owners political slant. :rolleyes:
I sort of assumed they just didn’t want to have the political slant playing on the wall while they ate.
FWIW, to me a boycott doesn’t have to be political per se, but is of somewhere you’d like to go, but are refusing because of one thing. So if you love the food, but refuse to go because they’re rude, that can be a boycott. But if it’s just generally got worse and you don’t want to, it isn’t a boycott, because you’re not deliberately staying away to make a point, you just don’t want to go.
Well, its one thing if its about just the owner’s slant. Its another if you are forced to listen to it. I think sports are the stupid but I don’t think its actually immoral to like it. But if a place has a TV playing sports and it’s loud enough that it’s hard to ignore I ain’t going back unless I am desperate or the food is to die for. So, if you don’t care for FOX (much less hate it with all your heart) I can see not wanting to be forceably exposed to it.
Oh, I once boycotted a local gas station/convience store because they cut down a couple beautiful giant oak trees just for the hell of it apparently.
There was a little Mexican restaurant that I loved. I went in there in late 2008 and they had a bunch of Yes on Prop 8 (to amend the State Constitution to stop same sex marriage) propaganda on the counter. As soon as I saw it, I turned around and left. They ended up closing down a couple years later.
There’s a Thai restaurant literally 40 yards from my condo that I went to twice or thrice when I first moved in. Then, a couple years ago, they posted a flyer in their front window advertising a fast for Gaza Strip that some organization was organizing. The restaurant owner was probably completely oblivious to the implication of that event, but still, I’m never going back there.
Yes. As others mentioned it was more about the owner feeling the need to force feed his politics to customers.
I used to go to a BBQ place that played country music, which I generally dislike. However, one day the owner decided that he was gonna play Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. The food was great. However, if I went into the place and it was Rush hour, I’d turn around and go someplace else.
What about avoiding certain restaurants or types of restaurants for health reasons?
I stay away from buffets in general, even if they have good food. I know that, if I go to a buffet, I will end up eating way too much. I solve this problem by going to buffets only on very rare occasions.
I stay away from casual chain restaurants (such as Applebee’s or TGI Fridays) unless I’m eating with someone who really likes them. I know their food tends to be very unhealthy. The ones that do have healthier things, the healthier things tend to be stuff I can’t have (they include chicken, and I keep kosher, so I don’t eat chicken in non-kosher restaurants), or stuff I don’t like as well as the less healthy stuff. I know if I go to that kind of restaurant, I will most likely end up ordering something that is very unhealthy. So I go only very rarely.
I stopped going to Baja Fresh when I found out how many calories their nachos (which I love) have (about 1900). 
That’s more or less academic now, since the closest Baja Fresh to me is in State College, a 3 hour drive away (and I have no other reason to go to State College).
I’m staying away from most Japanese restaurants until after I finish breastfeeding. The problem there is, the stuff I really like mostly includes fish that is high in mercury (ahi tuna or yellowtail).
Good point. They sucked; I quit going.
I used to say that I boycotted Domino’s because of their politics. The truth was, their pizza just sucked.
I’ve never really boycotted anything. While my friends were boycotting Wal-Mart because it was so TERRIBLE and AWFUL (nevermind they wore sweatshop-made GAP jeans and such), I just didn’t go to WM because I hated the atmosphere. When I was younger - like twelve- I was all hoity-toity about Nike and other sweatshop brands, but not as much as an adult.
One thing I won’t do, though, is cross a picket line.
Are you sure they didn’t just mistakenly give you the tofu friend rice or something instead?
Actually, if you want to get technical, I think an official “boycott” is an organized refusal by a whole lot of people to patronize a business, in hopes of getting them to change an offensive policy. It takes more than one customer for a boycott just like it takes more than one worker to go on strike.
You can boycott them for two reasons. Both their pizza and their politics suck.
In the same spirit, I boycott Wal-Mart for three reasons. Their politics suck, every time I go there I get bad service, and I don’t like the atmosphere at their stores. I’d rather pay a little more somewhere else than go to Wal-Mart.
I actually had a dream about a specific doper last night. They got very sick eating at a Turkish place. They got rabies from a eating a bat. So I would suggest all you dopers out there would do well to avoid any Turkish places that serve bat. You’ve been warned.
I have a favorite restaurant that I’ve avoided for the past five years. It’s not their politics, and certainly not the food. It was a favorite for me and a certain ex. She held the place in a certain reverence. It would feel disrespectful for me to go there without her.
Almost everything Wal-Mart does I’m pretty much okay with. There’s a few things they do to their hourly employees that are crappy, but definitely no worse than the average “mom-n-pop” supermarket owner.
Anyway, the reason I stopped all shopping at Wal-Mart around 2010 or so is because every location of theirs around me decided to stop staffing cashiers at any hour of the day. Didn’t matter if I went in during morning, noon, afternoon, evening, or even late night, you’d have at most 3 express lanes open and 2-3 normal registers.
Now, it had long been the case for Wal-Mart to have 25-30 total registers but only a small portion staffed, but the portion was always enough you could get out reasonably quickly.
It became pretty much common place for me to stand in line at Wal-Mart for 10 minutes or more before even getting to put my stuff on the belt. One Wal-Mart in this area had a self-checkout station for a little while, then it was mysteriously turned off and never turned back on, so that isn’t an option around here either.
The final straw came one night around 10:30 I was doing some later in the day quick purchasing of random household products and I stood in a huge line for over 25 minutes at the only register in this massive store that was open before taking my $20 or so in laundry detergent and such and dumped it on one of the closed checkout lanes belts and walked out.
I’ve basically decided I’m fine paying more money to places like Kroger/Food Lion for random grocery products (just about the only thing I buy at Wal-Mart, although they have a few other commodity type products I’d buy occasionally) because my time has some value that isn’t $0.
I boycott Cheesecake Factory, Olive Garden and Outback Steakhouse because I believe it’s completely immoral and unnecessary to make and serve a ridiculous amount of food that has the ridiculous amount of calories and/or sodium. Every time I’ve eaten at any of those places, I felt bloated and lethargic afterward. And thirsty, my God…I’m certain the owners of Outback also have their own salt mines.
Here, too. Paolini’s used to be the best Italian restaurant in Bryn Mawr–I have never tasted tomato sauce as good as theirs and never will again. My family had been going there for 30-some years when they changed chefs (hell, after 30-some years, he probably died of old age).
Food became . . . average. Tomato sauce like what you’d get from a jar. We’d been so loyal to the owner and the staff that we tried going back a few times, but we–and everyone else–just fell off. Place closed less than a year later.
Every time I’ve eaten at Cheesecake Factory, what I’ve ordered (if it was not cheesecake) sounded a lot better on the menu than it actually tasted. Then I look up the nutrition information after I got home and am generally horrified. I am not sure how they manage to make food that is so bad for you taste so mediocre. I also don’t care for the ads in their menu (they make the menu bulkier and harder to browse) and their policy of not taking reservations, even at locations where people are often lining up outside the door. Other popular restaurants solve this problem by- guess what- taking reservations.
Outback may be using so much salt in tribute to Australia as the #5 salt producing country in the world.
I do think it is a problem that casual chain restaurants serve such large portions. It certainly is for me personally, and I think it’s a larger societal problem as well. I try to avoid any restaurant that competes on “value” or portion size rather than on quality of food. I’m overweight, so more food for less money is not a good value for me. Especially since I know I will generally end up eating most or all of what they put on my plate. Maybe this works well for people who can say they’re only going to eat half of what’s on the plate and take half home for another meal. I doubt I’m the only one who manages to do this in practice only once in a blue moon. A lot of us were raised to “clean our plates,” and it’s hard to shake off that training at these restaurants.