The last two times I went into Wal-Mart (which were, I believe 2, and 3 years ago) the same strange event happened. Both times a morbidly obese women would be standing in the middle of the aisle yelling into her cell phone:
“Yeah, it’s a shame he’s fucking your sister. But you knew he was scum when you married him.”
I am the smartest bestest one in the store every time I go to Wal-Mart.
Religion.
I completely understand wanting to boycott Wal-Mart based on their business practices, but I don’t get the idea that they only sell cheap, poor-quality crap. Most of what they sell are well-known brand names.
I don’t like to shop there based on the fact that they’re always packed and never have enough check-outs open, and because the stores are always dirty and sloppy-looking, with boxes of merchandise strewn around. But they’re only place I can get Dickies heavy duty work pants at a good price.
If I buy them from my employer, they’re $30. Other stores sell Dickies for around $20-25. At Wal-Mart, they’re $13. Sorry, but I don’t make enough to justify spend an additional $10 or more on work pants, just to support another store.
I don’t know if they count as simple-minded, but I had quite a run of bad luck with pet store rats. I originally adopted two from a group of eight that my friend had “rescued” (I didn’t ask questions) from a university lab.
Those suckers lived FOREVAHHHH.
When the second one of those died, my husband (in response to my weepiness over Rat Death #2) bought me two baby rats for Christmas from a pet store. The first one died within two weeks. By the following June, we’d cycled through three pet store rats. At that point, we gave up.
Well, it’s not the entire reason I don’t shop there, and not even a huge reason I don’t shop there. I’m also not claiming that everything they sell is crap, just that in general the items they carry aren’t on the high end of the spectrum, quality-wise. For example, if I want a cooking knife, I’m not going to find a Wusthof-Trident or Sabatier at Wal-Mart.
This really isn’t much difference than any other big-box department store, and I haven’t been into one in years, so I guess I can’t make any specious claims on whether Wal-Mart’s cheap junk is any junkier than K-Mart’s cheap junk. 
This might be a dumb question, but I’m not originally from the Chicago area, so … why?
Err… different.
For decades the Cubs were the only team in MLB to play all their home games during the day. (82 in all)
It was a quaint anachronism that made Chicago baseball unique. You’d have to live there to fully appreciate the tradition. I suspect only Red Sox fans could fully appreciate Wrigley.
Night baseball at Wrigley is a crime.
Wrigley Field was the only major league baseball park without lights for many years. When the Cubs made the playoffs in 1984, the situation turned ugly. TV demands that games be played at night for the higher ratings and ad revenue.
The Wikipedia article explains the situation quite well.
Trust me, many Wal-Mart employees are overworked. The ones you see standing around have probably given up on getting three people’s jobs done in half the time they used to have to do their own. Not all WMs are bad, but corporate seems to take special glee in doing what they do, and are insanely controlling of individual stores. Other companies might well have similar policies, but at least they have the sense not to gloat about them.
I forgot another one – Chick Fil A. That one’s hard when I’m where they are, because for some reason I adore their chicken fingers, but the company is obnoxiously fundamentalist. That’s their right, but I don’t like giving my money to people who will use it to fund such things as pro-life organizations. I don’t think there’s one for 1500 miles from where I live now, though.
Jiffy lube. I despise the hard sell tactics. I just want an oil change dammit.
The owner is a pompous ass-wipe of a racist politician, that for some reason, people around here LOVE.
Sorry dickface, while your ice cream may be top notch, your politics are slime, so you won’t ever see a dime of my money.
Citgo.
I prefer Target to Walmart because there is better customer service but I have no problem shopping there.
Wal-Mart – The ghettoizing of America.
Citgo for me too. Forgot about that one.
Yeah, and it is really hard to find info on it. Links I discovered on the matter have been “dissapeared”. But when you consider if it even could be true…
Yah, I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist, :eek: but they inflitrated Allstate/Sears before and that is well documented, so this is not without precedent.
I don’t shop at Wal-Mart if I can at all avoid it, and I don’t eat Domino’s pizza if I can avoid it. But I don’t really count those as boycotts, because I just don’t like shopping at Wal-Mart, and I don’t like the flavor or texture of Domino’s pizza. Every time I’ve been to Wal-Mart, I had more trouble finding stuff and waited in line longer than I generally do at Target. I don’t agree with Wal-Mart’s or Domino’s politics, but I wouldn’t shop at Wal-Mart or buy Domino’s pizza even if they donated to causes I support, so I don’t consider that a boycott.
I particularly dislike the Wal-Mart near where my parents live. It bought space in the local mall. So far so good, but they insisted that they have their own outside entrance, with no way to get into the rest of the mall without going back outside. That’s just a little too anti-competitive for my liking.
I don’t eat at McDonald’s or other fast food places, but that’s because I keep kosher, so there’s not much I could eat at most of them. I think Burger King has a veggie burger I could eat, but their fries suck, and what’s the point of fast food without fries? That would be like Thanksgiving without stuffing…
I try not to buy anything from pet stores that sell cats or dogs. Mice, hamsters, birds, and fish- I don’t care so much. I try to buy from pet stores that have in-store pet adoptions of dogs or cats from a local shelter or rescue group. That’s partly because I strongly support pet adoption, but mostly because it means I can look at the cute little puppies or kittens while I’m there, without the guilt of supporting puppy or kitten mills. Also, every pet store I’ve been in that had in-store adoptions has had clean cages or pens that were reasonably sized for the animal in it, and didn’t have too many animals in one cage. Every pet store I’ve been in that did sell cats and dogs has had cages with wire mesh bottoms with puddles of urine underneath them (yuck!), too-small cages, and overcrowded cages.
I would be leery of buying pet supplies from a pet store that sold fish if the fish tanks were clearly not maintained properly, just because I would think that meant that they didn’t care about quality or cleanliness in general, and going there would be a depressing experience. I don’t shop in stores that I find depressing. I count my blessings that I’m not poor enough to have to.
I don’t buy wines made by Sebastiani, because the owners were involved in getting a parental-notification-for-minors’-abortions proposition on the California ballot (twice, and it got defeated both times, fortunately).
I don’t give to charities that are involved in religious proselytizing on behalf of religions I don’t follow. I’m not Christian, so I won’t give money to any charity that I think will use any of that money to try to get non-Christians to convert to Christianity. I wouldn’t give money to charities that were involved in promoting, say, Islam, either, but that doesn’t come up nearly as often.
I wish I could boycott factory farmed meat and poultry without giving up meat and poultry altogether. But, what with keeping kosher, I have a choice of two brands at a store with an excellent selection… I don’t buy veal, though.
I hope my cats’ food contains dead animals. They’re obligate carnivores, so they need to eat bits of animals. While they may be among the world’s most spoiled kitties, I’m not willing to buy live mice or birds and release them in the house for them to catch.
You do realize that this is true for every pizza buffet restaurant (Pizza Hut has one as well, as do several others), or any buffet or any fast food place for that matter, not just Cici’s. Any food place that doesn’t make food to order generates extras that are tossed if not eaten. I’m not pro corporate and I do care about the homeless, but Cici’s and others made a corporate decision to follow a business model that will make them a profit, not to shit on the homeless. If anything, blame the Health Dept- its their rule.
I still boycott Exxon. While the spill was bad enough, at least much of the blame centered on one man. Their continuous refusal though to compensate the fishermen and residents directly affected is criminal and the blame for that extends companywide.
Sam’s Club. Not because of any marketing practices or anything - they were really, really rude to me 17 years ago and I hold grudges. A LONG time.
Ditto, I don’t buy from Oberweis.
Almost complete boycott of Wal-Mart/Sam’s Club, and not because I’m better than everyone in the store. I grew up poor and haven’t forgotten it. I hate their corporate policies, their messy and dirty stores (at least around here they are), their crummy wages and lack of/poor benefits (Costco is practically a shining beacon of how to treat employees and they manage to make money), and their understaffing stores, especially the checkout line. I don’t completely boycott them because I do have relatives who want Wal-Mart gift cards for presents, and their stores in some areas actually seem pretty well kept-up and are adequately staffed.
Veal. I’m a vegetarian but I don’t even get it to make dinner for my husband. He’s pretty disgusted at the treatment of the calves too, so that’s not much of a loss for him. I do have to say that Michael Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking book almost made me run out and buy the makings of veal stock, though. He had me until he acknowledged on a next page, in a non-negative fashion, the relative worthiness of vegetarian cooking and other cuisines/chefs that don’t use veal stock.
(On that note I’d list Kobe beef because if it’s raised in the traditional fashion, they coop them up much like veal calves, but for about 3 years rather than a few months. Yeah, they don’t exactly have an idyllic life, contrary to the hype. Beer gets funneled down their throat, not presented in a nice trough. Note that the real stuff, raised in that prefecture and of the correct variety of cattle, doesn’t come over to the US unless you’re extraordinarily lucky. If you’ve had it outside of Japan it’s probably wagyu which is typically only partially that particular breed and maybe or maybe not raised in a more humane fashion, and perhaps not even from Japan.)
Diamonds.
McDonalds. The jerks dipped their french fries and hash browns in beef stock and didn’t disclose this fact for years, maybe decades, even in India IIRC. I believe they’ve changed the practice in India but merely switched to disclosing it here - you can go to their website and check the ingredients and see for yourself.
Pet stores that sell puppies and kittens - places that bring in reputable adoption agencies for adopting out animals are fine.