What do you boycott?

Carol_Stream · January 26, 2008, 4:22am

Witty, not so much. The idea that pet stores shouldn’t sell pets is the silliest thing I’ve heard today, though.

MsWhatsit · January 26, 2008, 4:31am

Wal-Mart, for being anti-union as well as being a god-awful shopping experience.

Comcast cable internet, for outstandingly shitty customer service. Lest you think I am kidding, we briefly lived in an apartment where DSL was not an option, and I used my 56K dialup modem rather than send Comcast another dime of my money.

fatgail · January 26, 2008, 4:33am

Then you should do a touch of reading on the horrendous conditions of puppy mills and how female dogs are bred to DEATH, carrying litter after litter that are crammed into pet stores and sold for ridiculous prices when every day thousands of mutts and dogs that people swore they’d keep forever are gassed because everyone’s looking for a puggle.

River_Hippie · January 26, 2008, 5:34am

Wal Mart.

matt_mcl · January 26, 2008, 5:48am

I completely avoid Wal-Mart and McDonalds, and I only buy fair-trade coffee beans (I’m not that picky about the coffee I buy in cafés, though I do prefer coffee shops that sell fair-trade and will buy the fair-trade option if it’s there). I generally avoid stuff packaged in too much plastic.

As for diamonds, I’m not so sure about Canadian diamonds, even there. I can’t say I approve of tailing ponds full of dangerous chemicals just above the Nahanni watershed, though admittedly it beats small Sierra Leonean children with hacked-off limbs. I’ll basically be forgoing diamonds altogether, I suspect. So nice to know that so many things one can’t afford anyway are ethically questionable.

And I don’t intend ever to have a car, even if I eventually do get my driver’s license.

Nava · January 26, 2008, 5:50am

Department stores. I use them as window-shopping, but don’t buy there unless it’s pretty much unavoidable.

Why do I buy most of my computer supplies in the local hypermarket and not in a computer store? Because most computer-supply-requiring projects take place on weekends and storeowners are dumb and closse on Saturdays :smack: But in general, when a store has “market” somewhere in the name I’ll use it to buy only food.

Chocolate comes from the fair trade store. Coffee would only nobody at home has coffee any more.

BlueKangaroo · January 26, 2008, 6:14am

Wal-Mart, for a variety of reasons.

Amazon.com, a very recent addition, because they have taught me repeatedly that I get what I pay for, and I am no longer paying for horrendous customer service and blatant money grabs. (This is so true that I just refused to consider buying something from target.com because their website is powered by Amazon.) At this point I would like to spend a little more money and get something in a brick and mortar store where I am at least helping to keep someone employed locally. If it’s a local mom and pop store, so much the better. Provided I don’t need to eventually boycott said “mom 'n pop shop”. Ironically, this all happened while I was unemployed, and price should truly have been the main driver for my decisions. And still Amazon managed to so thoroughly screw the pooch that I decided to spend more and get better customer service from here on out.

I try to avoid large stores like Target and Wal-Mart in general, but I admit that Wal-Mart is the only one I steadfastly refuse to shop in. It’s got all the problems of other stores like that, and somehow manages to be even more depressing.
There have been other, local places over the years, but as I’ve moved they have been forgotten, since they are unlikely to come up again.

The_Real_Thing · January 26, 2008, 6:17am

East Side Mario’s because of that idiotic “Badda boom, badda bing” ad campaign.

matt_mcl · January 26, 2008, 6:53am

Oh yes – I shop at independent bookshops if in any way possible and never order off Amazon unless it’s literally unfindable elsewhere, though I’ve made the occasional impulse purchase at Indigo.

I never, ever buy queer books from mainstream bookstores – they never have anything new or interesting or that I haven’t read anyway. Now that the queer bookstore in town has closed (again), anything remotely queer gets ordered from Little Sister’s in Vancouver, who’ve been leading a series of valiant court battles for years against Canada Customs censorship. There’s only ever been one exception – when I ordered a queer comic book from Amazon because the author specifically asked people to do so on a certain date to bump her ratings.

Sublight · January 26, 2008, 7:32am

A particular electronics company that also happens to be one of my clients. This is purely personal. Having to look at one of their products in my house would make me feel sick. I’ve written many rants about them, but this one from last year pretty much sums it up:

me:

Early in my career, I encountered one of their managers who was the most miserable people I’d ever had to work with. No life, no family, no friends, no regard for anyone else’s time, no ability to come to a decision, and a pathological need to keep changing everything. She has no idea what she wants, but she knows what she doesn’t want, except that she can’t tell you what that is and she may change her mind again later. When we produced a new product brochure that consisted of eight paragraphs, she showed up at 9pm to discuss corrections, and then proceeded to spend more than an hour on each paragraph, hemming and hawing and making wrinkly faces at everything we suggested and trying to rewrite everything herself. She knows enough English to mis-interpret everything, and freaks at the thought of using any word that has more than one meaning unless we painstakingly walk her through each possible interpretation until everything has been turned into bland nonsense.

And then, when I started working on other projects with the same company, I found that everyone there is exactly the same as she is! Whatever corporate culture they have has selected out all but those with the right combination of spinelessness, entitlement and insecurity over their own incompetence. One project had five of us at a series of orientation meetings with developers, all of which turned into us sitting there watching the developers argue for three hours over what the product did, then promise at the end to email the materials we needed since they hadn’t actually covered anything they were supposed to in the meeting.

Any time you think things are finished, they come out of left field with changes for things that have been in plain sight since the very beginning. At the end of one three-month project, after they’d pushed everything behind schedule because they couldn’t provide feedback on time (“we’re still looking it over, we’ll get back to you tomorrow” for weeks in a row), they call us just 12 hours before a 30-page catalog is to go to final printing to say they’d like everything in a different font!

I don’t get angry at a client for pointing out mistakes I’ve made; they’re mistakes, they shouldn’t be there and they need to be fixed, so hunt them all down, please. I don’t mind when information changes (this option isn’t available anymore, that attachment has new specifications, etc.); it happens all the time, and it’s nobody’s fault. It doesn’t even bother me when a client keeps making arbitrary style changes because they can’t make up their mind, as long as there’s some acknowledgment of who’s responsible, even just a “Sorry, but could you…?” when the revisions come in. But nope, everything coming from them is treated (on their side) as though it were the only possible answer, it’s been decided since the beginning, and the only reason to revise anything is because we’ve obviously screwed up. Even when the new request flatly contradicts an earlier request, it’s still presented as our mistake that they’ve just caught.