Obligatory: fuck Nestle

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.

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

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.

chik-fil-a…

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.

• 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) [EDIT: more info]

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.

Nestle.

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.

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. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use-slow-smr-tech

• 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. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/

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.

Goya

Cemex/Cemusa, they buy all the cement Mexico which due to international pressure has no ability to tariff it or anything then sell it back to Mexicans at extremely high prices so Mexico, which is the Saudi Arabia of cement, is filled with half built buildings because no one can afford fucking cement.

Nestlé, Amazon, Coca Cola, Mars & its associates, Mondelez ("Kraft" for the 'muricans). I try to avoid basically any corporation greedy enough to go against human rights in the name of profits.

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

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.

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.

Samsung appliances or Samsung smart anything. SSDs are tolerable but I'd rather find someone else.

HP printers but they are especially bad so all HP.

Any device that requires a cloud connection, account, or specific app to work. Hard no.

Most of Nestlé, of Lactalis...

Whatsapp is difficult for me to avoid, but I've been pulling it off for years now.

Honestly here in the NL it's almost as if people see it as some sort of government institution. We have neighborhood watches on there and they openly display the logo as a form of security measure. Honestly it's kinda creepy that that kinda stuff flows through their opaque servers and software.

I'd prefer an open and distributed protocol, with the largest node being government run. You can't avoid such large nodes, so it's better if they are run by a centralized democratic system. Aka @gmail.com, Lemmy.ml, mastadon.social (did I get that right?)

Müller (Unternehmensgruppe Theo Müller), an unscrupulous European food company with ties to the radical right. There are plenty of alternatives, including regional ones.

Müller owns numerous prominent brands, especially in Germany and the UK, but also in other countries.

Nestle

Most fashion clothing brands.

The additional expenditure rarely maps to better quality.

And if they make watches too, don't buy those. They are always the cheapest watches with a name stamped on.

Chick-fil-A

Nestle, Microsoft, Reddit, Roku, Meta, X, Google (as much as possible). I would boycott so many of them if it was possible, but I particularly avoid those because I especially hate them.

Literally all of them. Any big company is doing evil things, and I doubt there is an exception to that rule. Shop local, grocery shop at a co-op, eat local, prioritize products you know are actually made in your home country. Most importantly; just buy less. Repair the things you own, take care of them, borrow from friends. Never buy something "surprisingly cheap".

Samsung; just a lot of general very anti-consumer behaviour.

LG; a "do not sell my data" option on a TV that's turned off as standard? No, thanks.

ASUS; has become pretty unreliable in my experience and their RMA shenanigans haven't helped.

Apple; overpriced and anti-consumer, I wouldn't mind getting a MacBook as a gift or something, though...

HP; cheap garbage that's obsolete the moment you buy it and becomes e-waste after the warranty has expired. Their business line is marginally better but there are far better options out there.

Huawei; see above.

Nestlé; do I really have to explain? They're pretty much the worst company to ever exist.

Spotify; endless price-hikes to enable the CEO to buy more soccer teams and firearm manufacturer shares, pay artists almost nothing per stream, disabled their car thing after two years, lied about Spotify Hi-Fi....

Ugh god... Tech brands, off the top of my head:

• Asus (Scammers)
• Lenovo (Fuck lenovobios, bad hardware quality past 2010 or so)
• Sager (Scammed me by selling a laptop with too high power draw that resulted in crashes)
• Microsoft (Mega spyware corp, bad software, worst OS on the planet)
• Apple (Likely spyware corp, Bad locked down devices, anti right to repair, overpriced)
• Google (Biggest Baddest spyware company, monopoly on many platforms)
• Nvidia (Extremely hostile to open source, will likely never work on OpenBSD unless Nvidia seriously changes their stance; even then there's so much bad faith at this point I wouldn't trust them)
• Meta/Facebook (Mega spyware corp, zuck is a lizard)
• Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams, proprietary software ecosystem that won't work on my phone)
• All major phone manufacturers (Android sucks, iOS sucks harder)
• Pine64 (Charging circuit is software controlled for some insane reason, supports Manjaro)
• All major smart TVs (spyware, always-on microphones, locked down OS with ad-ridden clients)

Okay companies:

• Valve (Still hosts a shitty DRM platform, but it's the best one; only listing because the Steam Deck is awesome)
• Framework (Pro user repair, good hardware, no complaints; look forward to RISC-V board)

Sony, for all sort of reasons (the rootkit and other DRM, pushing proprietary formats like MemoryStick and ATRAC3, removing OtherOS (a.k.a. Linux) support from the Playstation, etc.).

Blizzard, because of Freecraft and BNetD (I was boycotting them long before they merged with Activision).

Ideally, I would boycott Nestle and the other abusive agri-conglomerates, but honestly probably a lot of their products slip through because (a) it's hard to tell what's made by who because of all the subsidiary brands, and (b) with all the consolidation, pretty much everything is made by some shitty megacorp these days. I mean yeah, if I eschewed normal chain stores entirely and tried to buy everything from local small businesses or something then I guess I could avoid them, but ain't nobody got time (or money!) for that.

I avoid anything from iSSrael, Russia or China as much as I can, also anything related to Elon Musk

TikTok and Kaspersky.

Not really answering the question but I've completely stopped buying anything that requires USB micro B. I can't fucking stand that connector. USB C costs a negligible amount more and I've yet to have a single port or cable fail irreparably after using it for the best part of a decade.

An actual answer to the question? I'm done with Microsoft and Nvidia. I'd love to add Google to the list but I'm still largely entrenched in their ecosystem.