this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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The first panel is pretty accurate tho.
The best way to show a company you do not want to support them or their practices is to stop giving them money. Voting with your wallet is the thing that'll be the the most notably change in an earnings call. I feel many people forgot that.
It's not always convenient, but you can't just take all the benefits of a capitalist system without having any of the responsibilities.
It's almost funny how sometimes, this works, but for the completely wrong reasons. Bud light tanked HARD - because of a trans ad. Coca-Cola had an (somewhat unsuccessful) boycott - because of alleged connections to Israel. On the other hand, nestle has been killing people in Africa for at least 2 decades by buying up the entire water supply and nobody seems to really care.
I'd really like to see people take some responsibility and think about which company they are giving their money.
Is it still pretty accurate when panel one is using an iPhone from 2018 like I am?
"voting with your wallet" in the way it's usually meant does not and has never worked and puts the burden on individuals to invest an inordinate amount of time and research for typically minimal returns like "support potentially slightly less bad company B instead of slightly worse company A." Voting with your wallet also shames those who don't have the financial resources to feasibly pay for "more ethical" things, which are typically also more expensive.
Your time is far better spent on higher yield things. For example, boycotting, meaning organized movements with specific demands, does move the needle. Using directly democratic levers to push forward policy when available, such as state ballot proposals in the US, works. Replacing products from companies in your life with community made things (like lemmy), which I view as a form of prefiguration, works. Labor movements like general strikes to push policy forward works. These things actually bring people together and are worth their time investment, unlike "voting with your wallet."
I really don't like that statement at all. Individuals SHOULD think about what and from whom they buy. And let's please not pretend this is something you have to invest hours of your day into - nestle products are very clearly branded, windows is very clearly branded etc. I'm not mad at people for not being able to identify every single sub-company of nestle, coca-cola etc.
In some cases, absolutely. But let's not pretend like nestle branded products are always cheaper than the store-brand alternative. And if we're talking about iPhones, well, I don't think we have to talk a lot about those.
That IS voting with your wallet, but on a larger, more organized scale. However, if people were more conscious about their purchases, individual boycotts would be similarly effective.
Based on your other comments, your proposed solution to iPhones is Fairphones and Shiftphones, which are not only more expensive than lower-end iPhones, but also typically only available in Europe.
It is though, precisely because, as you say, there are many many sub-companies for nestle and coca cola. They are near-monopolies owning large swaths of products making it difficult to identify alternatives, and once you identify true alternatives, you have to determine whether those alternatives are really "more ethical" whatever that means. It's truly a waste of time.
Boycotts are different because the demands are clearly vocalized and efforts are coordinated, making for a bigger impact. There's also the carrot of "if you do xyz specific actionable thing, we will come back and start buying your products again." Boycotts also don't require the same level of time consuming scrutiny on an individual level. You look at the list of brands and you avoid those brands. Easy.
I haven't bought a Nestle product in the last few years. Not even when I was in Japan, surrounded by a hundred different flavours of kitkats.
It's possible that they have the iPhone for some reason other than they bought it new. Maybe it was a gift from a parent who uses iPhones, or maybe it was a hand-me-down, for example. Point being, the guy in the second panel doesn't have enough information to say what he's saying.
beyond that, even if it was bought new, its not like that person can, upon learning something about apple that they dont like, go back and retroactively un-buy their phone.
If anything, throwing a perfectly good iPhone in the trash and buying another smartphone would be even more hypocritical
Just because you were gifted it doesn't mean you have to use it. You can sell it on the second hand market and buy something else. My parents used to gift me kitkats for years until they realized those are nestle and I always gave them to coworkers or friends.
So your parents are not allowed to give you a gift from an evil corp but you are free to give evil corp gifts to people that you know?
Those coworkers and friends are the devil!
If someone is complaining about the reasonableness of the price of an Apple product, while using one (and presumably leaving on the features that advertise in messages that an iPhone was used), I think it's fair to assume they are paying or going to pay those prices, especially because of all the stuff Apple does to maintain a closed ecosystem of products.
There's also the implied expectation that an ethical company would be voluntarily using the money they get to make sure they are giving back to employees and the broader society, but that's unrealistic because companies never work like that.
Voting to break up monopolies via anti-trust law enforcement will have more effect. “Voting with your wallet” is useless when oligarchs buy out their competitors on this hypothetical voting ballot.
If law enforcement has to get invovled via anti-trust laws, society has already failed. If society would be more responsible with their purchases, we didn't need law enforcement clean up our messes.
Yes, that's the entire point: this system has failed. You can't change the system by "voting with your wallet", that has never worked to bring about any kind of change
I'll disagree. We had a lot of success stories regarding that. The most prominent is the recent bud light boycott (even tho for the, in my opinion, wrong reason), but before, we had:
So no, boycotts do work. It has worked earlier and can work now.
The problem is that most people are complacent and straightup don't want to bear the responsibility of doing something against those corporations.
All of those companies are still giants though? How successful could that be?
The trick is to get organized and do it together.
You'd be making a great point if Google, Samsung et al weren't also behaving atrociously.
The thing is, there are other smartphones out there. You don't have to go with the big heartless corporation. There are phones like fairphones (https://shop.fairphone.com/) or Shiftphones (https://www.shift.eco/en/). So let's please not pretend you can only choose between the immoral behemoths when it comes to smartphones - or most other sectors, to be honest.
And I should probably add - you CAN still buy a refurbished google phone, for example - infact, I would consider a refurbed google pixel with graphene OS on it the best option for people that want privacy and want to act morally correct.
You seem very sure about this. Can you source this with any examples?
Companies care about making money, if you and many many many more people stop giving them money, they will be negatively affected. What kind of example do you need?
I need examples of successful consumer action. The theory sounds good, the practice isn't. There's a reason why companies don't make anti consumer action propaganda but they do anti union propaganda
There is literally no product you can buy in a capitalist system that did not feature suffering somewhere along the manufacturing pipeline.
The absolute best situation you can hope for is that every single person in the chain from acquisition of raw materials to manufacturing a finished product is that the only suffering they experience is "I am forced to do this labor so I don't starve"
I should point out that this is an extrme rarity in supply chains and manufacturing goods. Typically it's much worse.
The reason things are like this is that it's very easy for humans to compartmentalize things and ignore the suffering of others if it makes their own situation just a little more bearable.
As much as I wish Nestle would shrivel and die, there are far too many people out there that will buy the baby formula or the chocolate bar without even considering the misery that went into making it. And even if they know about it, it's easier to just buy it and feel a small pang of guilt than go without.
That's a common excuse for not doing anything at all. You don't have to make the world 100% better. Sometimes, 20% is already plenty.
That line of thinking only benefits the large corporations in the end. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, so whatever, let's keep consuming from the corporations around and let's not try to reduce their power? It's like criticizing veganism because plants are also living beings, and we can't eat anything without causing some form of suffering.
True, but my point is that this is a systemic problem. You cannot buy different things to solve it.
You would do much better by reducing your consumption rather than buying different brands
Por que los dos
not to be a debby downer on you, but short-term fluctuations in any given companies stock-price is rarely indicative of anything. there is a whole side of trading built exclusively around "event trading". see something negative in the news? open up a short-line on that ticker to crash the price, see how far emotional gamblers take it down....then cover for a solid profit.
considering the type of people generally on lemmy, i imagine your already quite disillusioned with the state of our society but if for some reason your a glutton for punishment and want to become even more disgusted...there's a book I highly recommend you read.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, written over a century ago as sort of tongue-in-cheek guidebook to how this casino we call the stock/futures market (that we have seemingly tied our entire economy too...) really operates, everyone who trades professionally is familiar with all the fundamental ideas laid down in that book, any that arent don't survive a recession/crash cycle.
If ~15% of all people stop buying a companies products, this is not a short-term fluctuation. It's a long-term impact on the companies bottom line.
for a business that sells piss-water to alcoholics at a massive markup...it's irrelevant. the vice industries especially are pretty much always immune to hits to their bottom line. liquor stores never go out of business...
now, that doesn't mean the stock price isnt still overpriced. a <1% dividend return on a mature company with pretty much zero organic growth potential...it was still overpriced when it dipped to the 30's.
nobody smart, nobody who truly knows how the market operates is buying BUD, but that's just it...it literally is a casino. because it's a casino many people have been conditioned to buy into bluechips mindlessly every paycheck, no thought whatsoever just DCA and wait...it's the equivalent of those retirees throwing away their disability/pension checks into slot machines.
with how the US casino works, the special rules only the US markets have...market makers can easily run the price up on those bluechips, and they/insiders can dump the price just as easily....pay to spread some FUD through the WSJ or some 3 letter news network, let the retail horde think they're coming onto this information organically...because when your the one controlling the PA on a ticker all you really need to make $ is volume to buy/sell into, and the best way to get volume is to get emotional-gamblers trading thinking they have some inside scoop/edge
that book really does explain everything, it's an absolutely disgusting system humanity has built for itself. wallstreet and bankstreet never changes, they just occasionally rebrand
15% loss in profit affects any business, no matter what they sell.
bruh...this is exactly what i'm talking about. look at their actual reports. like i said, it's a casino designed to lull everyone into short-term thinking complacency.
profit up 3% over the last 9 months compared to previous, ebitda also up...expected for vice industries in a recession (still wildly overpriced though, for the dividend they payout. that won't change till the powers that be decide to crash the price).
when people are struggling to figure out how to pay their rent/mortgages, they'll still be buying american piss-water...a majority of the country lives paycheck-to-paycheck, likely can't afford any other entertainment/events if they even have them available out in bumfuckastan
...you said on an iphone^¤
heh, gotcha
^¤ or similar device
Aren't boycotts illegal in some parts of the US or is that only for Israeli products?
I somehow doubt the goverment can disallow you from not buying certain products.
They have said in some cases it is illegal to organize to boycott anything conservative-owned. Like Twitter.
That would be crazy and - probably - not legally enforceable, even in current state america.
Even the threat of suits is effective
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsuit-advertisers-boycott-new
https://legalclarity.org/are-there-states-where-its-illegal-to-boycott-israel/
They apply to the government, not private people