Asklemmy

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.

I avoid Nemix RAM, because the first time I bought a bunch of sticks from them, they had an 18% failure rate. I paid to ship the bad sticks back, and they sent me more bad sticks. Nemix said they worked fine, so I sent them the Memtest screenshot with all the errors. They didn’t want to pay shipping to replace them again, so I just returned them and got some Micron RAM, and it’s been working perfectly.

Dollar, Hertz and Thrifty car rental. Also Budget, but for different reasons.

Never use Dollar, Hertz or Thrifty under any circumstances unless you want to be fucked. Never prepay with Budget unless you want to be fucked.

Crowdstrike
Microsoft

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.

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

Hyundai . i will never buy another one again. ever.

seats are hard as rocks. they break down way to fast. the rear view mirror is set way to low in the window creating a safety hazard for looking forward. it needs to be set much higher on the window. (so i have to look up a little to see the mirror... so f'ing what?!) get the damned thing higher so it doesn't block my view when i try to look front and right of the car.

that's just a few of my annoyances with that car. i'm done with that company.

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.

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.

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.

McDonald's.

I'm not much into fast food but if I'm craving a burger and chips I'll get it from a pub.

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.

chik-fil-a…

Goya

Late to the apparent party but Phillip Morris . They own a shitton of food and pot licences.

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.

Gillette. Due to their toxic masculinity ad. Why are they talking about that stuff? I went to them for shaving stuff, not for a talk about toxic masculinity or whatever. The good thing about the ad. It got me into safety razors. They're way better then cartridge razors. So thank you, Gillette. For making me stop using cheap plastic razors.

Apple

Obligatory: fuck Nestle