this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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So far my list includes Comcast, EA, and Nestle. Tell me yours, and I'll help out.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (47 children)

Here's my list that I avoid if and where I can. As with everything, things are nuanced and complex, and it's not like every company I personally boycott is outright bad or good all around. I wasn't going to write down the reasoning for each and every one, but ask away if you want to know about the reasoning behind particular ones. I'll also note, this is 100% not in any order (other than as they came to mind), it was time consuming enough making this vs. ranking them all!

Disney
EA
Volkswagen
Tesla
BMW
Audi
NVIDIA
Nintendo
Google
Apple
Facebook
Shell
Microsoft
X
Discord
Reddit
Old Spice
Costco
Netflix
Spotify
Nestle
Toyota
Tencent
Blizzard
Uber
DuPont
Fountain Tire
Walmart
Boeing
Brave
Princess
Moxies Group
Hewlett Packard
Amazon

On the flip side, companies that while not perfect, I think overall are doing good things that I try to support when I can (if only with word of mouth in some cases):

Valve
Framework
Firefox
Pine64
Raspberry Pi
Hyundai
Lucid
System 76
A&W
Trail Tire
Plex
Amanita Games
iBroadcast
Volvo
Napa
Fairphone

There's probably more I'm missing, I'm a pretty strong believer that companies rule most of the western world and that if individuals want the world to meaningfully improve, we have to vote with our wallets as diligently as we vote at the polling stations.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Amazon is one of the most evil companies on the planet and yet it's not on your list but Costco is? Gonna have to completely disagree with you. Costco is probably one of if not the best company in the fortune 500. They operate and live by their code ethics to do the right thing. They've never ever had a lay off of employees, they treat people right.

You called them out for a subscription model, yet don't understand what they are offering at all. What store can you shop at that offers products at zero margin? Costco's yearly net profit is the number of members times the membership cost. Their entire business profit is only the $100 membership fee per person. That's all they want to make from each person.

Edit: And then you have Amazon. Where they use people and dump them. Have a vulturistic operating model. They literally have meetings and design their software to trick people into buying at a higher cost. They'll manipulate anyone anyway they see fit to make as much money as possible from them. They sell stolen and counterfeit products and they know it, they just let it happen because validating products would cost them money. They'd rather just say sorry if you catch them and give a refund.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Wow I must have totally spaced there, thanks for catching that! As I note in an above reply Amazon probably makes my top 5 most hated companies, I absolutely 100% do not shop there or use it, I can't believe I missed that on my list, my apologies.

I did not know that their only profit is on their subscriptions, and I'll look into that as I'm doubtful of that (I could be wrong though!) Thanks for the info there, but I still fundamentally take issue with subscription based models, as well as other issues I note in replies above with them like business displacement, bad personal experiences, and the urban sprawl they create. Again I'll reiterate that no company is outright good or bad, and Costco is definitely pretty low on my bad list (perhaps deserving of being viewed more neutrally by me), the general view definitely seems to vary from mine so perhaps it's worth reassessing.

As to your notes on Amazon again, I 100%, utterly, could not agree more, I just apparently missed them on my list and have since edited them in! Definitely an awful awful company, it astounds me furthermore how virtually everyone is unanimous on this, but nonetheless virtually everyone seems to use them anyways. Some others in the comments swayed my views on Hyundai to change, but I believe my views on Costco stand, based on the replies of some others, it seems the policies of Costco vary somewhat where I live vs. other countries (e.g., using bouncers instead of machines at the door, disallowing people from using even the food court without a card, etc.) so that might factor into why my views on them are different. Thanks for your input, I'll be looking into Costco more about their profit model!

Last minute addition: I did a bit of looking and it seems we're both partially right, while Costco offers some items at cost or at a loss, they do indeed turn a profit off of actual sales in store(again, perhaps this is different by country, and might not be the case where you live?), as well as membership fees, and profit margins on eCommerce sales as well.

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