It’s in the area, yes, but tbf, I have seen Sunset and Burger King next to one another in at least one other city in Denmark so maybe it’s just something they do? I dunno. Bilka and McD - in the city where we were waiting for our order - are a few km away, so not right next to it, but nearby. Relatively. Roll n Eat is not something I’m acquainted with, though. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there, I just don’t know about it.
Us boycotting products in stores is more of a consumer protest done to signal our distaste towards our former allies. I don’t think any of us are kidding ourselves into thinking that boycotting Burger King or M&M’s is gonna make a change in the American economy. But it is a visible protest done to showcase how we feel and that is why we do it.
Where the individual can affect America is to delete themselves from American platforms and stop using American tech all together.
On a nation level, our leaders have to (and are in the process of) look into replacing American military equipment and American tech. Many of our systems are entirely based on Microsoft today and we must find alternatives and we must reject all American tech moving forward.
But that shit takes a very long time and it is very expensive and complicated.
It is similar to when Russia invaded Ukraine. Back then, there was also talk about boycotting Russian products in stores, but we all knew, that it was the gas we needed to boycot and that was and still is a long, slow and expensive process.
Russia and America feel confident in their current behavior because so many of us have become so dependent on their gas/tech that all Russia has to do to hurt us is turn off the gas and all America has to do is to shut down Microsoft and turn off our military gear with a press of a button.
When we have freed ourselves of both of them and have found ways to sustain ourselves, we will stand on more equal footing with them.
We made the big mistake of thinking that America and Russia had learned the same lesson from WW2 that we did. They didn’t. Of course they didn’t. It wasn’t them who had bombs and guns raining down their backyards. It wasn’t them who felt the loss of life up close, witnessed atrocities or had to carry the guilt of them for decades afterward.
WW2 to them is like a computer game. A fun little anecdote where they declare themselves the badasses - especially the Americans. They have absolutely no idea what WW2 was. It was just an action film to them there they get to cast themselves as heroes.
It’s one of the reasons why I always preferred German and Eastern European War movies. They have always kept that shit real.
Boyfriend asked me to buy detergent yesterday. Ariel specifically, and I looked up the company owning Ariel to make sure they weren’t American, but they were, so I went with the local discount brand instead.
There are very few exceptions I have made where I still use American products, but for the most part, I avoid murican.
We had a comical example of the boycot over the weekend. In my city Burger King is right next to Sunset, which is a Danish owned fast-food restaurant. We were going on a longer trip and needed some fast and easy food along the way. We arrive. Not a single car in burger king’s drive in. A caravan in Sunset’s drive in. We were - no joke - stuck in that line for 40ish minutes. Not a single car gave in and switched to burger King. We all just waited patiently for our orders to come through.
Before new years it would have been opposite. There were always cars waiting outside of burger King while sunset was largely ignored. It’s not that their food is bad. Actually, I have been pleasantly surprised after trying some of the items on their menu, but they were just seen as not a real fast-food brand before. McD and Burger King were the ones people trusted because they were the real deal.
But not anymore.
It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.
Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.
I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.
It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.
I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative “social media” like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn’t suck ass like they do nowadays.
But at some point, there will be no skip button. You know it, I know it, we all know it. This is like the creepy uncle who starts out by giving you candy and playing football in the yard. Then he wants you to sit on his lap before candy or football, but you can jump off whenever, until the day, he won’t let you. That is what these companies have been doing. I still remember the arm twisting they did when they took over youtube and we all liked youtube so much, we ended up giving in to it.
The end game for them is to own all your personal information and have total control over your online activity. Them giving you a skip button is a fake comfort. They probably already know where you live too.
For my part, I have just accepted that my basic bitch info is out there. Whatever I haven’t shared myself, have been shared either by a phone book service in my country or by databrokers who have sold my info to random companies and scammers.
Anonymity online is an illusion unless you are a very tech savvy which most of us are not.
Reminds me of how millennials and generations onward have learned less and less maintainence skills to the point where most of us can’t sow or fix shit if it’s broken because we grew up in a consumer culture where you just buy a new one when the old one breaks. The quality of products have decreased too so they break quicker which gives people incentive to buy a new one instead of fixing.
My parents generation hold on to old items and they patch up their clothes and know how to fix shit around the house but they didn’t teach me any of that because the culture shifted and it wasn’t really needed.
We are not only losing skills and tactile learning and understanding, we are also rapidly torpedoing out planet into a massive trash heap. Which is a bit of a duh, I know, but still.
I for one have noticed the insane decline in the quality of clothes after covid. It is shockingly shitty now and tears faster than ever. Shirts and leggings I bought ten years ago still hold up while similar shirts and leggings from a few years ago already tear or unravel. It is shocking. I guess this is what will eventually happen to art too.
Yeah, I switched to Salling. I also just like Salling in general because they make discount versions of almost everything. It’s cheaper and the quality of the product is often either as good or better than the brand products. When it comes to detergent I like Salling better because it has a relatively neutral smell and my skin doesn’t itch when I wear my clothes after washing.