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What's your list of banned brands?

What brands do you avoid at all cost? I don’t keep up with the news all that much, and many of the reasons to avoid something don’t make it there anyway. So I’m asking here to make a big list of things to avoid. It could be anything from bad security practices to really frustrating packaging. Working as a cashier myself, I definitely know there are plenty of brands I avoid purely on the basis that their product is a pain to stock.

On the flip side, what’s the alternative? If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?

owenfromcanada ,
@owenfromcanada@lemmy.world avatar

Obligatory: fuck Nestle

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

Fair enough. They’re so big I need an app just to keep track of if something’s made by them or not.

eatham ,
@eatham@aussie.zone avatar

Which app? Is it on f-droid?

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

Sorry, I wasn’t very clear with my reply. I haven’t actually found an app that does this kind of thing very well, just yet. My reply was more in the line of “I wish I had an app to do this, because searching the internet takes forever”.

Some brief searching came up nowhere when I went looking a few hours ago. I did find two apps on Google Play that seemed like they might work, but both had their own blend of issues, and neither was on f-droid, unfortunately. They were “No Thanks” and “Boycott X”, if you want to try them out.

Vanth ,
@Vanth@reddthat.com avatar

Starbucks. Union busting. Support of Israeli government committing genocide. Bad takes on race and gender. And they burn their beans to shit.

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

Fair enough. I’ve never been, don’t much like coffee, and I can’t say I ever plan to go there. They don’t sound like the most pleasant of places to relax in.

pineapplelover ,

Even if you like coffee, they make absolute shit coffee. Go to a local coffee place instead. I like my Vietnamese coffee, so any Vietnamese coffee place will give me much better cup.

black0ut ,
@black0ut@pawb.social avatar

Oh, the starbucks “thing” isn’t even coffee. You’re not losing anything by not going.

corroded ,

Apple.

I refuse to pay a premium for locked-down proprietary hardware solely because it looks more visually pleasing than an alternative that performs better.

witty_username ,

My work forced a recent macbook pro on me. One of those with the ARM chip.
I am in awe of the quality of that macbook.

Tak ,
@Tak@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s certainly one of those things where I love to hate on Apple but some things they do, they do very well.

0_0j ,
@0_0j@lemmy.world avatar

Exactamundo! That’s why snapdragon is playing catch-up LOL

neo2478 ,

Tell that to my 2014 MacBook Pro that is still going strong. I can do CAD and video editing and the thing still performs fine. Battery life decreased a bit but still lasts way more than enough.

and the new Apple chip ones are also ridiculous. I have one for work, and was able to leave my computer closed in my backpack for several hour running code training an ML model. The thing did not even get warm and the battery went down by 2% only.

That being said, I think the best computer is the one that works for YOU. In my previous job I was forced to use windows and boy did I suffer! Even Office felt clunkier on windows than Mac.

pr06lefs ,

Tesla. Elon is proving to be a consummate billionaire scumbag and I don’t want to be associated with him.

punkcoder ,
@punkcoder@lemmy.world avatar

chik-fil-a…

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

Huh, haven’t heard that one before. What did they do?

I’ve never been to one, so continuing that isn’t much of a bother to me anyway

Chozo ,

The chain's owners regularly donate to anti-LGBT organizations. They used to do it through company donations, but after being called out for it they stopped donating through the CFA corporation, but still donate privately to the same organizations.

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

Good enough for me, I’ll avoid them in the future.

i_stole_ur_taco ,

I gave up trying to maintain a principled list of companies because globalization and supply chains make it too hard to really find a single asshole.

Your chocolate was picked by slaves. Your clothes were almost certainly made by exploited workers. Does that toy have a lithium ion battery? You’re not going to like how many of the raw materials were extracted. The name of the company on the sticker of the shit you bought is just a small piece of the rot.

Tagger ,

Tony’s Chocolate …

BlorpTheHagraven ,

So god damn good too

neo2478 ,

They did a limited run of copycat chocolates as a fuck you to the other makers, and they were so much better than the originals. Especially their Twix and snickers.

Tagger ,

The toblerone one is incredible!

Someonelol ,
@Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

The saying “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is pretty true for most of us right now. The oligopoly we have going on makes it extremely difficult to consistently do the right thing. The only real way forward is to regulate the shit out of these products. If only we had another Upton Sinclair to scare the general populace into giving enough of a shit to demand unilateral action.

marketsnodsbury ,

Walmart and Sam’s Club.

You know you’re probably dealing with the baddies when the Criticism and Controversy section of your main article on Wikipedia grows to the point where it links to another Criticism of Walmart main article.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Samsung. For a bunch of reasons, but I think the main starter of it was when I learnt this story.

Amazon. I don’t think I need to explain why on this site.

Obviously both of these are near impossible to avoid completely. Samsung makes the internals of far more products than they put their name on, and AWS runs a big percentage of the web. But I avoid their store, Prime, and Audible.

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

Completely agree on both points. I actually use a Samsung phone, and it’s been nothing but a privacy nightmare. I’m planning to switch as soon as I’ve saved up enough to afford it.

Yeah, Amazon is a mess. I personally avoid anything even tangentially related to them. I’ve noticed that they tend to be lower quality with worse privacy than the alternatives, and their only benefit is price. Even then, Audible is a ripoff on a massive scale.

Aurenkin ,

Holy shit I hadn’t heard that story, that makes my blood boil. I would have contacted my embassy and turned that shit into an international incident. Also isn’t paying for someone’s flight in and refusing to let them fly back home some kind of trafficking charge?

Anyway, I guess it’s easy for me to say because I could at worst afford to pay for my flight home in a pinch.

ClassifiedPancake , (edited )
  • Nestle (not easy because the branding is not always obvious, but once you have it memorized it’s no problem)
  • Tesla (easy because the cars are shit anyways)
  • Müller (Luxembourg dairy product company that has close ties to the German fascist party AfD. Relatively easy but they do have some subbrands that are not obvious)
Tagger ,

I don’t want to ask this, excuse I like my yoghurt, but can you tell me more about the Muller-AfD link?

ClassifiedPancake , (edited )

The owner of the company is regularly meeting with Alice Weidel (one of the lead members) and says openly that he is interested in her party’s political views.

Tagger ,

Well, I can live without yoghurt

xilliah ,

I’ve been boycotting muller for a while kow because they had the most obnoxious ad imaginable and this was before I couldn’t take it any more and went for blockers.

Although I must admit part of me hopes that if we ever do go full cyberpunk that there will be a huge müller pyramid full of cows.

1000012897

FriedRice ,

Do you have a link to the story about Müller and connection to AFD, im asking because i didnt know that.

dan , (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

This might be an unpopular opinion but I avoid Western Digital hard drives after their two recent issues:

  • In 2020, they silently started selling SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives as NAS drives, without labeling them as such, even though they’re not appropriate for use in a NAS. They can get very slow and cause issues during RAID rebuilds. tomshardware.com/…/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use…
  • In 2023, they started flagging drives with a warning just because they had been powered on for three years (26,280 hours), even if all the SMART data was fine. The “fix” was updating systems like Synology to totally ignore WD’s alerting (WDDA) and only use SMART. I think the warnings are still present, but NAS software just ignores them now. arstechnica.com/…/clearly-predatory-western-digit…

Both were intentional changes to try and increase profits.

I’m using Seagate Exos drives, which are the same price or even cheaper than WD Red Pro drives, when on sale.

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

Huh, I didn’t know about that. I only bought mine because they were the only ones the store offered, but I guess I’ll try to find another brand when it comes time to replace them. I’ve been meaning to get a new NAS sometime anyway, so that’s a good excuse as any to do so.

dan , (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Their drives are good quality and work well. I just don’t want to give them any money after they intentionally misled customers :)

I’m in the USA and bought two brand new Seagate Exos “X20” 20TB drives for around $250 each last year. One from Newegg and one from ServerPartDeals. Normal price is over $350, but I’m sure they’ll be on sale again at some point.

theedqueen ,

When I first started using external drives I always used WD. I had two fail on me. Switched to sea gate and the one drive I got is still kicking. Will never use WD again.

Sterile_Technique ,
@Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world avatar
KittenBiscuits , (edited )

Jimmy John’s

The owner has been photographed with big game “trophies” of elephants and a leopard.

TW: deceased animals

Snopes fact check: true

This guy pisses me off so much. Hunting like this (where it’s private land, the staff do all the work of finding you a prize, & they basically point you at the endangered animal when it’s time to pull the trigger) is so obscene, grotesque, unnecessary, and self-fellating. Fuck this dude in particular.

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

Completely inexcusable. How people can get away with this kind of behaviour is beyond me.

Ephera ,

I mean, lots of them. But I have a personal vendetta against Amazon. I worked at two companies for a few months, which supplied to Amazon among others, and it was just ridiculous how similar and bad their experiences with Amazon were.

At both companies, whenever we had to stock a delivery to Amazon, we had to use these brand-new pallets, which looked like you could break a toothpick out of them and it’d be sanitary.

Why did we not use old pallets? Because even though Amazon demands all the products to be packaged individually (so they can send them out to customers directly), if even just a handful of the packages get damaged during transport, they will send the whole truck load back at your cost.

And the asshats would take our brand-new pallets, then send back old-ass pallets, which we were then forced to use for all our non-shit customers.

No one at these companies wanted to work with Amazon. It was just that a significant amount of orders came from there, because of people like you and me using Amazon. So, I decided to not do that.

xilliah ,

Do you have a recommendation for me as an online shopper?

Ephera ,

During the pandemic, lots of offline shops built up a web shop, so that’s where I order most stuff. Often enough, just opening up a map and looking at the shops near you, can already give you an idea. I’ll also just do web searches for a product and see if any specialty, offline-first or manufacturer shops show up.

What also often works, is to look on big aggregator platforms like Amazon, Ebay, Etsy etc., but when you’ve found a product, then look if that brand/manufacturer has an own web store, or again via web search, if there’s any other smaller stores also selling that same product. If you do that a few times, you’ll usually find decent stores where it’s worth looking at their other products, too.

That’s kind of also what I actually like about doing this: Anyone can sell any crap or scam on Amazon et al and since you can’t look at it for real, it’s difficult to tell what’s garbage and what’s not.
These specialty/offline-first/manufacturer shops usually have a reputation/customers to lose, so they generally only sell stuff with a minimum of quality.

Also, if you order multiple products, you don’t get a bazillion different packages delivered, but often rather just one, with all products combined.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Any brands that make devices that plug into mains power that aren’t UL or ETL certified. I’ve seen way too many cases where people buy generic smart switches with no certification and they trip the circuit breaker or catch fire due to poor quality construction. Certification isn’t perfect, but it’s way better than products not being certified.

SethranKada OP ,
@SethranKada@lemmy.ca avatar

I don’t think I’ve ever checked, but I can get behind that. I’d rather not die because a company decided to cut corners.

Know_not_Scotty_does ,

The awesome thing is that those marks can be counterfeit and you only know by looking up the number.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing I forgot to mention. Make sure the mark is legit.

In general, branded products that are an actual brand (not some Amazon special) and have good reviews should be okay.

ladfrombrad ,
@ladfrombrad@lemdro.id avatar

As a Britbong, I’m always proud of not only BS1363 and the safety it has brung us over the years but the fact that I know that number off the top of my head.

I usually have a goldfish memory for things like that.

Nemo ,

Coke. Assassinating union leaders is not something I can stomache.

black0ut ,
@black0ut@pawb.social avatar

CocaCola did what?? Why didn’t I know that? Guess I’m a pepsi guy now, wow.

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