Before you the only time I had heard people “say vote with your wallet”, were from right leaning family members who are now upset about “cancel culture”
Even entertaining that cancel culture is a thing and not just a reductionist view of accountability in general, then what they’d be describing is voting with your dollar on a larger more organized scale.
Pardon my tangent and I completely agree with you.
Yeah, although I'm not sure why they're calling Nokia a small business. They're a publicly traded corporation and my searching tells me their revenue last year was $25 billion.
I'm not sure about 'online small business' either. Most of the ones that are not actual corporations are selling via Amazon or eBay or Etsy, so you're still supporting megacorporations. If you're lucky, your town still has small businesses you can support with prices you can afford.
And that last part is a big part of the problem. The person above says you might not get very price competitive products. When so many people live paycheck-to-paycheck, you have no choice but to get the most price competitive products.
Consumers should not be shouldering the blame here.
I agree with you. Also, even small local businesses often support the systems that are at the root of the problem. I'm not going out of my way to shop at the local grocery store when the owners are actively harming my community by expressing and supporting all manner of bigotry.
At the farmers' market in a nearby town, there's a big to-do because a white supremacist farm opened a stall there and the farmers' market is allowing it. It even resulted in a second farmers market forming. It's ridiculous. They should kick the Nazis the fuck out of their farmers' market.
It's a really hard concept for some people that by inviting people like Nazis to the table, they are de facto excluding marginalized groups. For people not in one of these groups, I think it takes an effort to understand why that is.
i'm pretty much exclusively ordering stuff from "smaller" online shops that aren't "mainstream". i mainly find their products through an amazon link on duckduckgo, but order it on their website. it's often way cheaper too.
stuff like filament from esun's store
keychron keyboards on their own website instead of some reseller
and occasionally a reseller, but then it's usually otto, coolblue, notebooksbilliger, or similar websites. whichever have decent prices.
buying stuff locally is literally impossible in most cases. many stores went insolvent long ago, and the ones still remaining have a 2x markup most of the time. if they even have it in stock.
hobbyist shops might be possible to buy raw materials from, but (my niche of) PC accessories and 3d printing stuff ar hard to come by locally.
They are made by HMD Global which is a bad company that uses generic Foxconn smartphones designs with bad battery life, the worst cameras on the low-mid market, and terrible USB ports, puts shitty unsupported software on it, then licenses the Nokia name to sell to people who can't afford a mid-tier and don't know any better because they trust the name.
I had to manually replace the USB-C port on my Nokia 7.1 5 times in 2 years because they refused to offer any support at all when it broke 6 months after I bought it because they quite literally use the cheapest components possible.
Screw HMD Global. Do NOT support them. They are as bad or worse than any big phone company. Buy a Fairphone.
In addition to this, try to support co-operatives, unionized workplaces, and FOSS development! Even go out of your way to try to reject corporations as much as you can, reduce consumerism, and focus on local organization.
All of these help Workers have more power and build up your community.
especially donate to FOSS devs whose software you're using. even if it's just a little bit. these people do it out of passion, and your donation will let them continue working on it.
Instant Pot. Great company, reliable products, going out of business because they didn't fuck consumers. You can't beat capitalism by playing the game. You have to break the game.