The Products/Stores I Boycott & Why

How about you?

Image by Alex Fox from Pixabay

While it’s impossible to boycott everything — and there’s plenty to boycott in late stage capitalism — there are a few companies that have crossed so far over my moral line it’s insane, and nothing will ever bring me back as a customer. These are the stores and products I now steer completely clear of.

Frito Lay

The reason I will never buy Frito Lay products again is close to home. There’s a Frito Lay factory in the next town over where I used to commute for my job, and every morning my commuting buddy and I had to drive by it. Some days it just smelled like hot oil, but other days it absolutely reeked, depending on how long they’d been using the same oil to fry the chips in.

When the global pandemic hit, we started hearing the horror stories of the way Frito Lay treats its workers in our local factory, forcing them to work 12-hour days, 7 days a week. Some workers hadn’t had a single day off in months. For real. Employees were having heart attacks at alarming rates or committing suicide at home. Employees allege that a few years ago, a coworker dropped dead of a heart attack while working on the line, and supervisors had workers move the body so someone else could take the dead person’s place. But even with a dead body in the factory Frito Lay didn’t shut down production for…