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SUPPORT. SMALL. BUSINESSES.
you might not get very price competitive products, but these companies often still have the consumer in mind.
small online shops, phone companies like fairphone (or even nokia), video streaming platforms like floatplane (dankpods is hilarious).
voting with our wallets is pretty much all we can do.
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.
i think we should steal that term from them, like we did with "based".
What were they even doing with “based” before the kids punched up its branding?
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.
and definetely sign up for a worker's union.
Im doing my part! Few bucks can go a long way.
Sent from the "$15" Voyager app
TIL Nokia still makes phones
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 was a bit surprised by that statement as well. When someone says "small business," the first thing I think of is a mom and pop shop.
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.
loving this thread here and (most) everything in here! as a tiny ass farmer, that shit doesn't surprise me. I'll try to keep this comment specifically focused on an issue we've had with "farmer's" markets:
used to sell at a couple of em before covid, since then, we only sell on-site at our little shop. one of the larger, better markets a few years back starting letting this distributor begin selling at market, masquerading as one of us. they even wore fucking shirts about promoting local blah blah. they weren't from the area, they buy up bulk stuff (often not in season), then set it out in these pretty baskets like they just got done harvesting it that morning.
people would line up to buy their shit, while the 4-5 actually local ops that are honest and give a shit had to stand by and watch. tried to get the market organizer to care, of course they didn't. but, hey, people can take pics of their brave treks to the Local Farmers Market to post on the socials, so they can hear how great they are at supporting small businesses.
if I sound bitter, it's only because I kinda am 😂 carry on, love y'all who look below the surface and go out of your way to build community!
Around here, I feel like if you see someone dressed like they're Mennonites (they dress like they're Amish but use technology and the Amish aren't traveling to downtown farmers' markets), it's probably a small farm.
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.
I read it as
small ones, or even bigger ones like Nokia
So I think it's not saying that Nokia is small, but that Nokia is not in the same category as the few big big corporations.
they're very underrepresented in the phone market atm. the company behind it is huge, but the phones are very customer conscious.
not a small business at all, but still.
They don't.
I thought so too so I bought one.
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.
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.