Denny’s (3 years) for repeated attempts to kill me. I like that stripe of food once in a while, but every time I’ve eaten there, I’ve thrown it back up in a couple hours.
WalMart&co (3 years) for obvious reasons.
Ritz Camera (1 year) for being skullf*cked stupid (every one I’ve ever met).
RIAA (2 years) for treating their customers like criminals (and yes, I check RIAA Radar for every CD I buy).
Gelateria Naia (just starting) for closing down the Bearcade. Bastards. I really liked their gelato too.
No debate at all intended here.
Some supporters of Israel feel that Munich falls into the moral relativism trap. Among the things I’ve read: The terrorists are presented as loving family men; there is little time given in the movie to showing the murder of the Israeli athletes; Golda Meir’s quote shown in the ads about moral compromise is untrue and inane; there is an overal sense that the terrorists who kill civillian athletes are no worse than the Israelis sent to kill them. Also, Spielberg has made some extreme pacifist comments which seem to apply to Israel - “They should talk (to the terrorists) until we’re blue in the face” - but had no trouble glorifying American soldiers in Saving Private Ryan.
OTOH I spoke to an Orthodox Jewish Zionist friend this week who saw the movie and wasn’t offended at all.
I’ll try to find a link later tonight if I have a chance.
That was easier than I thought it would be:
I don’t boycott businesses, I fire them. Only chains I can think of is Office Max for their rebates and CVS for their extremely poor customer service.
I don’t shop at Walmart as a general rule because I don’t like the stores or the goobers that shop in them. I always feel like I’m in line for a Jerry Springer show. Their selection sucks and is poorly displayed. I haven’t fired them yet, just don’t like shoping there.
Oh, yeah, one more: Panasonic/Matshita (brand new), for their particularly bastardly insistence on treating DVD-buyers like criminals.
Walmart - because they are evil.
Shell - (thanks to stpauler)
Debeers - reasons already stated
I generally dislike the ideas of big box stores, large electronics chains, and things like that. I like small specialty shops.
It’s late and I may be misunderstanding this, but are you saying you’re not going to support them because they found a second market for a product whose sales were down in a first market?
Steven Spielberg is Jewish. For my Jewish, pro-Israel money, I’d rather support a Jewish dove than a Gentile hawk. I guess that’s just me.
Actually, when I first saw the preview for Munich, I was really hoping it’d be about a special forces team going in to save the athletes. I was somewhat disappointed to learn several seconds later in the preview that no, it was about Israeli revenge. Still, though, I think I’m going to see it.
Please explain. I want to hear more about this.
My parents have a long-standing boycott of Toshiba because apparently they (Toshiba) sold submarine plans to Russia while working as a defense contractor for the US during the Cold War. I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t buy Toshiba products anyway because I generally prefer their competitors’ goods, but that’s the boycott I grew up with.
My memory is a little hazy but…
The major problem with them selling to third world countries is that none of the families could afford the amount of formula needed to keep a baby healthy. Mothers (and fathers, I suppose) would water down the formula to make it last. A lot of babies died because of this. From what I understand, Nestle was a little underhanded about the whole process (not educating mothers how to use the stuff, etc.).
They were total fucking scumbags about it, in fact. They had Nestle reps. go into hospitals masquerading as nurses, telling women that formula was healthier than breast milk (which it of course is not). In fact, people using formula in developing countries face the additional problem that they lack a source of clean water, so not only were they feeding infants something nutritionally inferior to breast milk, they were mixing it with contaminated water to do so. And once women had used formula for a while, their breasts quit producing milk so they had to continue with the formula. Google INFACT (The Infant Formula Action Coalition); it was formed in response to the worst abuses.
My boycott of Jane Fonda continues.
Sophistry and Illusion and drm have it right.
This isn’t like Coca-Cola selling Coke all over the world, it’s more like BAT marketing Lucky Strikes in Africa, because people in the West aren’t buying enough cigarettes.
The WHO says that when the choice is between HIV-infected breastmilk and formula made from contaminated water, the choice is still the breastmilk. Also, breastfeeding is used in the third world for family spacing, and this consequence to using formula wasn’t adequately explained to people. Childbirth and Pregnancy kills up to 1 in 11 women in some parts of Africa. Pregnancies that wouldn’t have occurred if the mother had been breastfeeding also means maternal deaths that wouldn’t have occurred and children who wouldn’t have been left motherless.
That’s why I’m STILL boycotting Nestlé, I could NEVER support a comapny that did that no matter how sorry they were about it when the implications of their business practice was revealed.
The DVD region coding thing is a scam - it lets companies price-discriminate and sell a DVD for, say, $25 here but $3 in China, where the wages are lower and piracy higher, without creating a grey market. Unfortunately, if you move and start buying DVDs in another region, you have to buy another player so you can play both, or buy all new copies of your DVDs. On top of this it makes life really difficult if you’re trying to buy import films that aren’t available in the US. Early DVD drives just relied on software to check their region-coding; you just got a piece of software that lied to the drive, and life was good.
<nerd hat>
Around 2000, the media cartel got smarter, and since then, DVD drives have handled this sort of thing in hardware - they check on their own, and refuse to hand over the key if the region doesn’t match. You can change the coded region, but only a very few times - after this the system locks and can’t change anymore. Basically, the companies are selling you crippled hardware. Once again, they’re trying to cash in on multiple drives at least and preferably a brand-new set of DVDs. These drives are a little harder to fix: you either have to flash them to RPC1 (slightly tricky), or use software to perform a pretty straightforward cryptographic attack on the key (it’s pretty slow, but it works). Whatever. It’s a minor inconvenience if I get a drive that nobody’s cracked yet. I’ll grumble but won’t fuss over an otherwise solid piece of hardware.
The problem is that Panasonic/Matshita decided to be particularly bastardly in their latest round of drives (my particular beef is with their UJ-8X5 series, but I understand it’s involved in a lot of them). Their design is really Byzantine - some people aren’t sure if it can be fixed (certain behaviors are immutable, or so I’ve heard) - and, to make it worse, they implemented a particularly harsh region-enforcement scheme. If the regions don’t match up, the drive forbids access to the data. You can’t even attack it cryptographically, because the drive will absolutely refuse to read anything off the disc.
</nerd hat>
This is particularly stupid, because I can buy cracked bootlegs of foreign films all I want. It’s very easy, and I wouldn’t have to put up with Panasonic/Mashita’s crap. I like buying legitimate copies, though, and it really annoys me that Panasonic is actively treating me like a criminal for doing the right thing. So, no more business for them.
I am only actively boycotting one place: Raley’s.
Not once have I shopped there and NOT been treated like crap, or completely ignored.
Some of my favourite examples:
Buying a bottle of wine, and having the cashier ask me for an additional piece of identification because I had just moved and had an out of state driver’s license. Are you kidding? In RENO? With the amount of tourists we get through here and the amount of booze that flows freely amongst said tourists, I MOVE here and get hassled? She wouldn’t accept my car insurance card, my health insurance card or my Hollywood video card, she wanted another piece of picture ID. I left, sans bottle, and gave my business to the nice neighbourhood liquor store down the street.
Heading into the store for late night snacks with a friend - they close at 11, but it was 10:45 and we were confidant we’d have our groceries assembled in time. Except for every five minutes the guy would come over the loudspeaker and announce that they were closing, would everyone please evacuate the store IMMEDIATELY. We hurried and hurried, and arrived in line at about 10:53, to have the cashier snap at us “We close at 11, you know!” I said “Well I’m so very sorry to inconvenience you, but it’s not 11 yet.” At that point another gentleman nearby took over and rung us up, and apologized on the way out.
Finally, working for 16 hours one day at work and stopping for a couple things during the only time of day I had available for errands. My poor exhausted brain and eyes could not locate bacon. I had been wandering aimlessly for 20 minutes and had not succeeded in flagging down a single employee for help (they don’t have the machines that let you look stuff up). Finally one woman in the red jacket went walking by me, I got as far as “Excuse me…” and she snapped “I don’t have time to help you right now!” and just kept walking. I found the bacon by myself, made my purchases and it will be a cold, freezing day in hell before I give them any more of my money.
I HATE THEM SO MUCH!!
That is insane, as are the other two stories. :eek:
A friend of mine says I should boycott Target because their pharmacy won’t fill prescriptions for morning after pills. Does anyone know if this is true? It would be very hard for me to boycott Target as I loathe WalMart and KMart.
I did some Googling and found a couple of stories that say it’s up to the individual pharmacist to decide if he/she wants to fill it.
Hmmmm, I don’t know how I feel about that.
Sprint. They are lying, thieving jerks and they won’t get another penny from me.
I’d have to agree. I think the store should set the policies, not the employees.