I Won't Buy from (Company Name)!

[starrypawz]

For me, I tend to stay clear of Samsung displays and HP laptops. I've had three Samsung CRT displays fail on me in a ridiculously short time.

As for HP laptop, bad experience. I bought a HP Compaq laptop and the LCD backlight failed within 6 months. HP refused to repair it, saying that model is obsolete and kept pushing me to buy a new laptop. Fair enough, a third party store replaced the backlight for me, at a cost. Later, the display graphics chipset couldn't go beyond a certain driver version. It turns out that the video BIOS is outdated and a update is needed. Problem is, ATI, the makers of the video chipset of the laptop, did not distribute the BIOS openly and asked me to go back to HP. HP again kept telling me that the laptop is obsolete and kept pressing me to buy a new laptop, even though at that time, the laptop was hardly three years old. I stuck to the old drivers, even though this means many games won't run on it. I stopped using the laptop after I left college and only recently bought another laptop, one that isn't HP.

Dell.

I feel your pain. Dell is #2 on my laptop avoidance list. Not only did they provide crud support (my netbook's LCD display developed a crack, and they refused to service it even though the machine is still in warranty. It also only came with 1GB of RAM and refused upgrade modules of many companies), they refused to repair my mom's Dell XPS laptop on the account that the warranty has expired. And how much do they want for repairing the thing? Three thousand freaking Malaysian ringgits to extend the warranty. If I don't extend the warranty, it will still cost around a thousand for a new motherboard. Nevermind that the problem the laptop developed is widespread on the internet and there is a recall program, when pressed they told me that the recall only applies to North America.

That Dell laptop now sits in the store room, stripped off it's hard disk and memory modules (I used the memory modules to upgrade my sister's laptop). My mom now has a nicer, newer laptop that is not a Dell.

Dell...
Nearly every computer/laptop we have in college is a Dell model and they suck. They are really slow and they just lag so freaking much it puts my old laptop to shame

[Eviecorn]

I thought of one, actually ... I will never, ever have another Comcast service as long as I live.  Their customer service is just terrible.

[KaibaGirl007]

Simba toys. One of my daughters received some of these for Christmas and the accessories in them stunk of cannabis  

[Honeycomb]

Sony. Never again. My Vaio laptop crashed after a few months. Customer service was great, but still.

Procter & Gamble because of what they do to animals.

[BlackCurtains]

Oh, I have another too! Electronic Arts. OMG they will NEVER fix the Sims3. And they don't care! And they've made it perfectly clear they don't care! Screw them! *spits*

[stopxmotion]

Simba toys. One of my daughters received some of these for Christmas and the accessories in them stunk of cannabis  

But those are mermaids..?

[ZettaMomo]

Acer laptops. Just ugh. I had so much issues with them on my previous laptop and all my friends who have had their laptops have had all these issues with them too.

The funny thing is my new laptop is a Dell and I have been completely happy with it so far.


Otherwise I don't have any brands or stores that I try and stay away from.

[Jadis4742]

There's three companies I will never buy from again:


American Apparel. Shady business practices and sexist marketing.


Chick-fil-a. As good as the waffle fries are, I won't support such a homophobic company.


Forever 21. Ethical and copyright violations.


I also don't buy from that something-and-Fitch store because really? You want me to buy something in the dark when your store smells so bad? It's ridiculous.

[Rhini]

Chick-fil-A - for their treatment and thinly veiled retraction of their negative remarks toward the gay community.

Salvation army- for their similarly homophobic views and their support of extremist christian groups

Steak N Shake - Just too gross. Can't do it. I'd rather bake myself a lard pie, it would probably be healthier.

[DazzleKitty]

There are several dog food companies I will NEVER buy products from again....Purina, Iams, Cesars, Eukanuba, Ol' Roy, etc.  I will also never buy jerky made in China because it is treated with radiation and too many pets have gotten sick from chicken jerky. I cannot help but wonder what is in this meat where it needs radiation? It's horrible to think about.

The reasons I will not buy from some of the leading dog food companies anymore is that I have discovered the truth in what goes into many of them. Rendered pets.... I saw the video that someone took in an Iams factory where they were putting euthanized cats and dogs in the food. Vets say pets all go to a common grave if you don't cremate them. This "common grave" is a dog food factory. Half the time they won't even remove the collars....they just let it all be ground up.
That's not all.....zoo animals, road kill, rotten meat, and butcher junk meat left on the floor is put in this food. Anytime a brand has meat by-products in their food it can be any kind of animal.
The drug used to euthanize animals cannot always be cooked out of an animal so your pet is ingesting small amounts of this stuff. Many leading dog food companies use this. I'll never buy something you can find at Wal-Mart or any supermarket for my pet. I go for companies that use GOOD, HUMAN-GRADE food.

All of the leading companies like the ones mentioned above use meat by-products. Many have been recalled for making dogs sick. Geez, I wonder why?

Yeah....I'm off my soapbox now. I wish more people realized what goes into this stuff.

[Oneleo1]

Huh. I see Toshiba mentioned in here a couple of times....but the Toshiba Satellite laptop that I am on is 6 years old, and I have never had any issues with it. But I am not doing anything extravagant with it, just living on-line i musts have gotten lucky!

I am not a big WalMart fan, and I don't eat Burger King either.

I don't care for Dell, but I have several Samsung products (2 LED TV's, 2 BlueRay players, 2 Smartphones) that are all awesome We have never had any issues with any of them yet.

[xkelpiex]

Ugh, Dell and Acer.  Have had laptops from both these comoanies and the problems started on day one with both. Customer service for both are TERRIBLE as well!
And Staples....whee I bought these comps from. They don't even keep your name in the system for warranty so proving you have one is a pain in the rear end. And their customer service is awful. They don't treat you like a human being, more like an annoying fly they want to just swipe away.

[Koudoawaia]

There are several dog food companies I will NEVER buy products from again....Purina, Iams, Cesars, Eukanuba, Ol' Roy, etc.  I will also never buy jerky made in China because it is treated with radiation and too many pets have gotten sick from chicken jerky. I cannot help but wonder what is in this meat where it needs radiation? It's horrible to think about.

The reasons I will not buy from some of the leading dog food companies anymore is that I have discovered the truth in what goes into many of them. Rendered pets.... I saw the video that someone took in an Iams factory where they were putting euthanized cats and dogs in the food. Vets say pets all go to a common grave if you don't cremate them. This "common grave" is a dog food factory. Half the time they won't even remove the collars....they just let it all be ground up.
That's not all.....zoo animals, road kill, rotten meat, and butcher junk meat left on the floor is put in this food. Anytime a brand has meat by-products in their food it can be any kind of animal.
The drug used to euthanize animals cannot always be cooked out of an animal so your pet is ingesting small amounts of this stuff. Many leading dog food companies use this. I'll never buy something you can find at Wal-Mart or any supermarket for my pet. I go for companies that use GOOD, HUMAN-GRADE food.

All of the leading companies like the ones mentioned above use meat by-products. Many have been recalled for making dogs sick. Geez, I wonder why?

Yeah....I'm off my soapbox now. I wish more people realized what goes into this stuff.

That's pretty horrifying. Is there solid proof for this?

[ShortyBoo]

I thought of one, actually ... I will never, ever have another Comcast service as long as I live.  Their customer service is just terrible.

I hear this a lot, but I've never had an issue with Comcast, and they've been our TV provider since 1996 and we've had their internet service since it became available a few year after that. If there's ever an outage of either the TV, internet or both, I just call them up and they give us a credit on the bill and it's usually fixed pretty quickly.

There was only one time when I wasn't happy with them, and that was when the new DVR box I got wouldn't get any channels above 100, so they had to send out a guy to fix it. First off, he sees the cords we have running along the hallway and asks why we have cable hooked like this. I tell him it's nothing to do with the TV, it's the internet cords, which run from the router in the living room to the bedrooms. He tried to argue and tell me they weren't internet cords, like I wouldn't know, even though I'm the one who bought said cords and hooked them like that. I kept insisting that I should know what they are, after all, it's my house and he eventually dropped it, so I led him to my TV with the defective DVR. He kept insisting it was likely the cable lines that were bad (they were just replaced like a year earlier) and wouldn't accept that it could be a defective DVR box since it was new. So I took things into my own hands and ended up grabbing the working DVR from the living room and hooking it up in my room. Of course, all the channels came in just fine. So I take the non-working one out to the living room and the whole time the guy's still going on about how it can't be the box, but sure enough, once I hooked it to the living room, it could only get the lower channels. In the end, we got a new DVR and everything was fine. But I wasn't happy about that guy treating me like an idiot, then in the end, I pretty much had to solve the problem myself.

Anyway, as far as companies I avoid, there aren't many. Of course, there are brands I really like that I tend to stick to. Like Sony. Most of the electronics in our house (HDTV, digital camera, PS3, DVD player, etc) are Sony. I've never had any problems with any Sony products, other than a defective keyboard that came with my Vaio computer several years back (I now have my brother build my computers) and they sent me a replacement right away, which had pre-paid shipping labels to return the broken one so all I had to do was reseal the box with the broken keyboard, slap the shipping labels on and drop it at the UPS Store.

Well, I guess I do have two companies I strongly dislike. One is Wells Fargo, and the other is Electronic Arts.

EA, I mostly hate because I've been a Sims player for 12 years (since the beginning) and I really hate how EA is treating the franchise. The game is riddled with bugs, but they won't fix anything because they're too busy pushing the Sims Store DLC that's WAY over-priced. Oh, and I'm still pretty upset that back in the Sims 2 days, when the Bon Voyage EP came out, they switched their anti-piracy software to SecuROM, which promptly broke my CD burner and forced me to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows XP to get rid of it. Then there's the crappy, spyware-ridden Steam wannabe, Origin. I will never use it, ever.

Wells Fargo, I hate because of the way they treated my brother and my mom. So a few years back, I think 2006 or so, my brother bought his first car, a 2004 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder. It was an awesome car, and he was really proud of it. Unfortunately, the loan was through Wells Fargo. When his National Guard unit deployed to Iraq for a year, they were supposed to lower the interest, but they never did, and my mom spent a lot of time trying to get someone to fix it, but they either said they would do it (and didn't) or refused to talk to her. One lady accused her of not having permission to talk about the account even though they had it in writing and was so rude to her it made her cry. Even after he came back they refused to refund the difference of what he overpaid by them not changing the interest rate and screwed up his payments more than once. He finally ended up selling the car, just to be rid of Wells Fargo.

Actually, I just thought of another one: Microsoft. So my brother bought an XBox 360 a few years back (it's some kind of Halo edition, so the system is green and orange) and got two XBox Live accounts, one for himself and one for his roommate/best friend since they played together quite a bit on the same system. When he found out he was deploying to Iraq, he called Microsoft up to cancel both Live accounts because he'd be gone for a year (he told them why) and while he could bring his 360 with him, he couldn't use the Live service in Baghdad, so he wasn't going to pay for it. The first person he talked to said no, he couldn't cancel it. The second one told him he was lying and he could use it when he was overseas (apparently they also thought he'd have tons of free time) so he should just keep paying anyway. The third time he called, he finally got someone who said she could cancel it. Well, it turned out, she only cancelled one of the accounts. He tried calling back to get the other one cancelled, and they again, refused. He ended up having to cancel his bank card and got issued another one with a new number to stop the payments. His bank said they've gotten complaints about Microsoft not wanting to cancel accounts, and had suggested getting a new card. It makes me glad I own a PS3 and don't have to pay for online.

[Wardah]

Salvation army- for their similarly homophobic views and their support of extremist christian groups

I am not a big fan of Salvation Army either. I will never donate to them and I only shop at their thrift stores reluctantly. I prefer Savers but when it comes to toys at thrift stores you can only find what you find and if Savers is a bust that day but Salvation Army has something I collect I'm gonna buy it. But at least I don't feel guilty if I find a rare Pixietail in a G3 pony's hair and only pay .50 for the both of them.