Every once in a while, I am wronged by a company. It is a very frustrating feeling. Once you’ve gone through every possible support channel, escalated to managers and complained publicly about it, there’s little left to do but pursue legal action.
A legal move is very time consuming, and can be quite costly. In many cases, it is just not worth it. The situation makes me feel quite helpless. The only thing left is to swear the company will never see another penny from me.
This is when things get tricky. It turns out if you really don’t want a company to get your money, you have to boycott quite a wide range of companies.
Take Meta (formerly known as Facebook). Let’s say you are offended by their policy and want to boycott their services. Did you know they own Giphy since May 2000? When you use animated GIFs on iMessage, Snapchat, Slack, Signal, Telegram or Mailchimp, to name a few, you’re using a Meta service. Of course, Instagram, Oculus VR and WhatsApp are all Meta owned companies, too.
How about Coca-Cola? Let’s say you got a bad product and couldn’t get any compensation or even a proper apology. If you want to boycott Coca-Cola, you will end up cutting a lot of companies off. For example, did you know Costa is owned by Coca-Cola since 2019? Of course, that’s just a drop in the ocean.
And don’t even get me started on Disney…
My list of boycotted brands and companies keeps growing. John Lewis wouldn’t refund me on a faulty belt without an original receipt, the owner of Wetherspoons actively promoted the divisive Brexit, Apple and Dell both turned out to be such huge disappointments I’m never coming anywhere near them again. With Apple comes a ban on Beats, with Dell comes a ban on Alienware.
Standing by your principles isn’t always easy. On the other hand, it beats feeling utterly helpless in the face of injustice. It’s also encouraging to see you may be able to cut your spending with offensive brands to a greater extent than you initially thought.
If only there weren’t so many reasons to boycott so many companies.
Optimising My Life 