Voting With Your Dollar: A Big Fork Off to Equinox & SoulCycle

As vegans, we know how important the concept of voting with your dollar is. Spending money is a political act: what and who you decide to give that money to matters, because it gives the recipient power. The power to operate, the power to continue doing what they’re doing. Often, this is a happy decision. We support small ethical brands so that they can keep existing and providing products that don’t harm the earth. We support decent people so they know we’re behind them. And the flip side is equally important: We know not to give our hard-earned money to the big evil corporations who test on animals and contribute to serious global and environmental health problems. And, of course, we vote by buying vegan food and products, making the statement that we don’t support animal cruelty. Although being cognizant of what brands, products, and entities to support is a constant undertaking, it’s not really too difficult. My general rule of thumb is ‘don’t support assholes’. However, I see other people supporting assholes all the time (like allll the time), and I wanted to share my reasoning for not supporting a few things today.

The first one is a popular fashion brand, one of the most popular actually. It breaks my heart to see a constant stream of happy shoppers spending tons of money there at all times. And true I haven’t written about fashion in literally years but this seems like a good way to get back into that. The second is a restaurant chain that I actually loved, but when I learned about its behind-the-scenes drama, I had to stop. The third is a big bummer, because it’s an exciting new Broadway production that I won’t be buying a ticket to next season. I’m not telling anyone not to support these brands or events; I’m simply sharing why I don’t so you can make your own informed decisions. I know I have a lot of work to do myself regarding what companies, restaurants, &c I continue to support, so I wanted to share this in case others can learn from it.

ZARA

When I was studying abroad in 2005, I discovered Zara. I adored most of their pieces – it was like the affordability and availability of H&M and Gap but tailor-made for my style. I was obsessed. But then the following year, we saw that they were selling bags with swastikas on them. Seems like a really basic thing to know not to do, but there it was. The bags were pulled as soon as a customer complained about the offensive symbol, but considering how many steps there are from design to production to stocking and delivery in shops, it seems incredible that no one along the way noticed this aspect of the design until customers did. Indeed, the company’s apology stated that there were no swastikas in the approved design, and that they were just as surprised as we were when the Indian company who supplied the bags added this element. It would be a believable story if it were a one-off.

But then in 2014, they sold the infamous children’s shirt that resembled the striped uniforms that Holocaust victims were forced to wear: blue and white stripes with a yellow Jude star. This one wasn’t excused away by a supplier issue but by a difference in intention: In their apology, the company said that the star was intended to be a sheriff’s badge. And while it did indeed say ‘SHERIFF’ on the yellow badge, the combination with the blue and white stripes is at the very least ill-considered. Also, it reminds me of another controversial star image that was excused as being a sheriff’s badge as an attempt to excuse its blatant anti-Semitism.

Amid these problems with obviously anti-Semitic products, the fast fashion giant was investigated for horrific sweatshop conditions at a Sao Paolo factory. Then, there was the, let’s say underdeveloped “White is the New Black” tee shirt which was received rather poorly by people who are against racism, as you might expect. Since then, they’ve been sued by a former Jewish and gay employee for anti-Semitic and anti-gay treatment. And I’m sure you remember that Melania Trump’s famous “I Really Don’t Care Do U” jacket, which was received as pointedly referring to the tragedies at the border concentration camps but really could be about literally anything the White House is doing, was from Zara as well, to literally no one’s surprise.

The parent company, Inditex, also owns brands Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, and Uterque. Considering all of these issues they’ve faced over the years plus the allegations against those in positions of power in this company, I do not support these brands.

BY CHLOE

Some of you vegans or vegan-friendly eaters are probably aghast at seeing this popular NYC-based chain here. “What!” you might be saying. “I love Chloe! She’s the best!” Yeah, Chloe is the best, and that’s why I don’t support ‘by CHLOE’ anymore. After working her ass off for years and years to develop her own hugely successful brand, Chloe worked her ass off to build ‘by CHLOE’, a hugely successful vegan restaurant that now has more than half a dozen locations. But Chloe herself was forced out a few years ago, and the issues surrounding her ouster are complicated, to say the least. 

There were rumors that her business partners – Samantha Wasser, enormous hospitality group ESquared, and Wasser’s father Jimmy Haber, who is the CEO of ESquared – wanted to start serving meat under the ‘by CHLOE’ name. They’ve denied that claim, but that part is the least of it. It seems at the very least understood that there were many differences of opinion in how the business should move forward, and considering that it would all come across as being under Chloe’s own name, she understandably had strong thoughts about these next steps. However, an arbitrator ruled against Chloe. I’d normally show respect for that decision, but given the David vs. Goliath set-up of this dispute, it’s clear there’s more to it. And there is: in a lawsuit Chloe filed last year, she states that the group ousted her after she rejected Haber’s sexual advances. I don’t know about you but I believe women, and there is nothing easier to believe than an all-powerful white male CEO taking advantage of a beautiful young woman he has power over, and then acting out when he doesn’t get what he wants.

To top that off, nothing riles me up more than people abusing intellectual property law. (Okay obviously apart from abusing women, children, animals, &c.) This year, ESquared sued Chloe over her new pop-up restaurant Supernatural, which she runs with celebrity chef Supernatural and which I visited last month in NYC. ESquared sued her for trademark infringement, stating that this pop-up – with a completely unrelated name – would be too confusing to fans of ‘by CHLOE’ and they would think it was related, simply because it’s Chloe doing something else. By their logic, or lack thereof, brand confusion would arise whenever anyone did more than one thing. This dick move seems too much like a petty attempt to stop Chloe from working in food in NYC at all and I will not stand by while jerks try to use my beloved trademark law to defend something so weak and so clearly not a violation.

ESquared Hospitality also owns several non-vegan restaurants which you can find listed here. 

WEST SIDE STORY ON BROADWAY

I know, with this one you’re like ‘what in the world’, but there’s a reason. Next season on Broadway, mega-producer and well-known bully Scott Rudin is mounting a new production of West Side Story with director Ivo Van Hove (whose past directorial works in London have always smelled of misogyny). The cast of this much-anticipated revival was just announced this week, and in the prime role of Bernardo is New York City Ballet dancer Amar Ramasar, which decent people who love theatre are justifiably angry about.

If you don’t follow NYC culture news, Amar’s name has been discussed a lot in the past year for his involvement in a disgusting, disturbing case of sexual harassment and all-around despicable behavior at the ballet. He and friends of his (all men who should be in jail with him for their actions: Chase Finlay, Zachary Catazaro, and Jared Longhitano) from the ballet (all either dancers or donors) shared private (sexual) pictures and videos of female ballerinas in group texts and joked about all the crimes they would commit to them and other ‘sluts’. One of the victims – a young ballerina whose reputation and thus career was harmed – brought a lawsuit, and Finlay resigned from the ballet while Ramasar and Catazaro were suspended and then fired. Allegations in the lawsuit state that this sort of behavior was condoned from the top, as the NYCB and the School of American Ballet were well aware of the extensiveness of this type of behavior and did nothing to stop it, at one time asking the men to simply keep such actions in NYC, where it’s ‘easier to control.’ Obviously, the NYCB is on my shit list as well.

However, Ramasar and Catazaro were just reinstated at the ballet: the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) appealed their case to an independent arbitrator. So fuck the AGMA too. The arbitrator, whose identity I can’t find but I have a feeling it was someone with a penis, said their termination was inappropriate and suspension should have been enough. You know what else is inappropriate? Rape culture. While Catazaro declined to return at present because he is dancing with Bayerisches Staatsballett in Munich (another ballet company I won’t be seeing anytime soon/ever, hi Munich), Ramasar is back and now with two unbelievably coveted jobs in New York, two jobs that are both the kind that most people only dream about obtaining: a prime position at the NYCB and a starring role in a huge Broadway musical. COOL GUYS. Also Bernardo shouldn’t be 37 YEARS OLD.

You know what, fuck this revival anyway for not using Jerome Robbins’s classic choreography.

Okay those are my thoughts on this topic for this week. Considering my proclivity for complaint, this’ll probably be a regular series. What similar things have you just learned about that you want to share with the class?

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!