Voting with Your Dollar: 3 More Co’s on My Naughty List, Plus Thoughts on Cashless Businesses

This is #2 in the Vote With Your Dollar series in which I ruin things you probably love, and I’m sorry, but like, the world is a mess and we should try to do better. Every other Friday I’ll be here ruining stuff for you!

Today we are discussing three more businesses across vegan food and clothing/commerce I will not support: Papa John’s Pizza, Wayfair home goods, and Forever 21 cheap ass clothing. I’ve also got some thoughts on the hottest trend in capitalism: cashless businesses.

Papa John’s Pizza

I have been vegan for 11 years now, so those of you who are likewise not baby vegans can appreciate how difficult it was when we were just starting out all those years ago. Remember those vegan ‘cheeses’ that were probably made of cardboard? Remember making your own almond milk (out of necessity and not preference)? Remember getting a dry portabella mushroom on a bun with an enormous roasted red pepper whenever you deigned to go to a restaurant? Suffice it to say, being vegan nowadays, especially in big cities like London, is unbelievably easy and fun and exciting. What new incredible product will be released today? What restaurant will announce a fantastic new vegan option today? What new vegan soft-serve can I find? It never ends!

However exciting all these developments are, not all of them are good. I don’t mean tasting; I’m sure they all taste good. But something being ‘vegan’ isn’t enough to warrant our support. The company has to not be an asshole, at MINIMUM. I think that’s a pretty good rule! It’s hard to enforce consistently, but that’s what I’m here to help with and I hope you’ll help me too: figuring out which companies are decent and which are Papa John’s. Oh, today’s Vegan Food I Don’t Support and You Can Decide on Your Own I’m Not Telling You Not to Patronize Them I’m Just Telling You What I Do is Papa John’s and their newish vegan pizza options. Listen. I’m sure it’s delicious. Well no, it is Papa John; I’m sure it’s edible. And I remember how sad it was to not find good vegan pizza for like, years! I get it! Pizza is the best food on the planet and you shouldn’t have to stop eating it as a vegan!

But there’s no reason to have to choose Papa John. First of all, in London?? We have incredible vegan pizza options all over the city, including Purezza (man alive!), Picky Wops (what a name), even all the big chains like Voodoo Ray’s and Pizza Union and Basilico have vegan options. There are dozens of veg-friendly pizza joints all over the city I haven’t even been to yet! There’s a tiny shop that just opened around the corner from me that has vegan cheese! It’s EVERYWHERE. I have no reason to get Papa John’s when there’s all this actually good vegan pizza all over the place.

BUT, even if these other options didn’t exist, I still wouldn’t. Sure, that’s because I make my own really excellent pizza (Imah half eye-tal I gotta that spicy meataball in my bloodah), but also because this guy John? He ain’t my papa. He sucks.

John Schnatter, former CEO and founder of Papa John’s, is a long-time republican which sure used to just mean white businessman but now means an active racist, sexist, homophobe, anti-Semite, anti-everything good pretty much little fucker. Don’t believe me? He donated to the Cheeto Mussolini campaign. He spoke out against Obama and the Affordable Care Act, and famously stated that if he was forced to pay for the ACA and give his employees healthcare, his pizza prices would go up a certain number of measly cents. (To which the sensible world responded, “you mean you could be giving your employees g-d health insurance if you just charged 8c more???!!” and rightly boycotted.)

Then, he was loudly on the wrong side of history during the NFL protest controversy. And while he did resign as CEO after his use of the n-word on that matter came to light, this is still the business he founded, and a company is built on the ethos of its founder. I would guess that his viewpoints and beliefs are reflected at all levels of management within this company. No founder, or CEO, or racist, exists in a vaccum. Also, John still retains a stake in the company, obviously, since he founded it, and he is worth more than ¾ of a BILLION dollars. So, like, fuck that.

Wayfair Furniture

Moving is the worst, decorating a new home can be frustrating, and finding affordable but still stylish furniture is a nightmare. That’s why online home giant Wayfair has become such a successful brand. But fuck them. Wayfair may have sold that adorable side table and pineapple lamp to your friend from work, but you know who else they sold furniture to? The detention facilities at the U.S. Mexico border. Wayfair is in a partnership with the monsters running these concentration camps, and for that reason, I cannot support them.

As you may have heard, Wayfair employees recently walked out on the job to protest the company’s sales of furniture to the border detention camps. The employees involved first wrote a letter asking that the company refrain from such sales. The CEO rejected this request, naturally, because the kind of person who aids concentration camps is not the kind of person who cares about what some of his employees have to say. 

You might be thinking, well the migrant kids that the U.S. government doesn’t care if they kill have to sleep somewhere! And maybe, if the Wayfair corporate leadership had said that what’s happening is atrocious but their aim was to provide beds to make this horrible experience a little easier for the children, then that would be something else. Or maybe they could have sold the furniture and donated all the profits to charity! (LIKE SO OBVIOUS.) At least maybe some of them could be said to have good intentions. But do you know what statement the leadership team made? They said that they “believe in the importance of respecting diversity of thought within the organization and our customer base. No matter how strongly any one of us feels about an issue, it is important to keep in mind that not all employees or customers agree.” So they basically said, just because some of you easily replaceable employees don’t like that people are dying in concentration camps doesn’t mean we all do, so we have to respect the views of our fellow workers who LOVE the camps. I mean. And then of course they said as a retailer, their practice is to sell their goods to anyone operating within the laws of the USA. So you know, it doesn’t matter what’s right or wrong or just, it just matters that the people in charge of deciding what’s legal or not have determined that this particular atrocity, as with many they’ve created, is ‘legal’. Cool cool cool.

So obviously Wayfair is now on my list, as is anyone and everyone who supports the concentration camps. If you’re thinking ‘but maybe people shouldn’t immigrate illegally!!’ or ‘if they didn’t want their children taken from them and put in cages then they should have thought of that before’ or ‘but it’s a corporation that needs to make money and if they didn’t sell the beds someone else would have’ then please leave a comment with your contact info so I may persuade you to get psychiatric help and/or turn off Fox News. If you’re thinking, ‘darn, that sucks, but I can’t support them anymore either if they are supporting these ICE facilities’, then congratulations, you’re a decent person and you’ll be okay without their products. Also, as far as I know Ikea is still run by magical unicorn people who love us all.

Forever 21

I know, at this rate there will be no more fast-fashion brands who are destroying the earth with their cheap production methods and their overuse of resources left for us to shop at! Forever 21 was a last-minute entry to this post, as just a few days ago I learned about their sooooo-fun new trick of sending free Atkins diet bars inside online orders. At first, it appeared that only those who had ordered plus size clothes received the diet bars – which is so unbelievably evil and straight-up rude that it’s entirely believable for this bleak ass world right now. Fortunately (?), the bars were included in online orders across the board, not just in plus-size orders, so they weren’t being totally snide mean girls all like ‘you should rully try one of these barssss also thanks for giving us your moneyyyyy!’ I mean I’m sure they still were, but at least to everyone. (Do they just want all their customers to lose weight?)

But even if it wasn’t targeted harassment at plus-size customers (I feel it necessary to reiterate they were treating paying customers like this, for fork’s sake), it’s still absolute bullshirt to include diet bars that no one asked for inside otherwise unrelated and innocuous purchases. I’m sure they don’t care if a customer had an allergy to any of the ingredients. But I know for sure they don’t care if they are sending diet products to people with disordered eating histories or body insecurity – and given, um, statistics and facts, many of the women who received this ‘gift’ fall into those categories. Here, wear our clothes and also lose weight! What a great idea! It’s not just ill-considered and rude; it’s disrespectful. It assumes, as most of the world does, that weight loss is a universal goal, and an always-positive one. Obviously, the lads over at corporate didn’t think this through, or if they did, they really don’t care about women.

Also WHO is still partnering with forking Atkins? Is it 2003 again? Go fork yourself. Also your clothes are crap.

Cashless Businesses

A friend of mine recently said that he was on a mission to no longer support cashless businesses. Since London seems to be going all cashless lately and I am very aware of le crime, I was like but why? Isn’t it easier and safer and faster and just funner? (I didn’t say that.) Going cashless may help businesses thwart off potential robbers, I guess, but a) that’s not actually an enormous problem to begin with and b) the real result is turning away a significant portion of the community. Cashless businesses disenfranchise part of our population that is already incredibly vulnerable: homeless people, migrants, poor people in general who are unbanked. Not everyone has a bank account! Not everyone has access to a contactless card that makes you feel like you aren’t even spending any money because you just have to lightly tap it against the payment screen and then you’re done and it’s like whaaat was this all free? IT WASN’T. YOU’RE PRIVILEGED. As so many of our cities gentrify at alarming rates, these businesses are basically defining the clientele they want, and it doesn’t include everyone. And that’s bullshirt.

Now that I know it’s bullshirt, I’ve been doing my best to avoid patronizing businesses that don’t accept cash. It’s a tiny little action, and it probably doesn’t do anything, but aren’t most of these little protests just acts of solidarity anyway? With London being on the fast track to complete cashlessness, it’s been difficult. Just last week, Husbo and I had lunch in Canary Wharf, as we frequently do because of work, and when we went to pay, I noticed it was card only. SHIIIIIT, I said to Husbo. It’s cashless! I’m supposed to be boycotting these places! But then Husbo pointed out that we were literally in Canary Wharf – an entire little city built by banks, for banks. Of course this was a cashless place; the entire place – filled with endless underground malls – exists for bankers. Trying to support the unbanked sector of the community in Canary Wharf is literally nonsense.

But that kind of brings me to the point of all of this: you have to do what makes sense, for you and for the message you’re trying to send. This extends to veganism in general too: Sure we’d all love everyone to be vegan, but not everyone is able to, so let’s all do the best we can, and act within reason. That’s kind of the purpose of this series, after all.

If you missed the first in this series, you can find it at this link. I managed to ruin food, clothing, and musical theatre in one post!