US Boycott: 2 Months On

In March, I decided I’d stop spending my money on American goods and services.

In the time since, I’ve learnt plenty of lessons, so here they are.

Step 1. Know Your Rules

For me, the primary goal is to avoid as much money flowing to the US government as possible. US companies pay tax to the US government, so avoiding them is a priority.

After realising the goal, the next step is to define the rules to be maximally effective without being impractical.

After much consideration and a trial run, I settled on:

Step 2. Know Your Company

As most know by now, many seemingly UK/European companies are American-owned, so this involved a lot (1 full day) of research to start with.

I compiled list of brands (it’s very basic, as I needed something to share with my partner) and put it up here: https://stopbuyingthese.org

Not long after finishing my list, I discovered https://www.bankrupttrump.org, an impressive website that allows you to find alternatives to US/Russian products. At least based on my own research I can verify it is generally accurate.

When I’m in a store and I see a product from a company I haven’t seen before that I might want to buy, I do a quick look on Wikipedia to verify.

Most of the companies were what most would expect but there were still some surprises.

First, the closet American companies:

• Boots
• Morrisons
• Waterstones
• Costa
• Brewdog
• Travelodge
• Zoopla
• TK Maxx
• Sky (not a surprise to me, but apparently to some)
• Fox’s biscuits (incl Jammie Dodgers and many more)

And some I expected to be American but weren’t:

• Frankie & Benny’s
• Chicago Town pizzas
• Wickes, Ray-Ban and Holiday Inn were all founded in the US, but now are fully based in Europe
• Airtasker and JustEat (despite the very American ads)
• BT, EE, Tesco and Sainsburys have price gouged so much that it’d even make a sweaty New York private equity firm wince - but they are indeed British

To be honest, there were less American-owned companies than I expected, which was good news for the boycott.

Step 3. Profit

So, 2 months later, what have I learnt?

Revelation 1: It was much easier than I expected

When I first envisaged me doing this, I had assumed by week 2 I’d be eating out of bins late at night with the foxes. OK - perhaps not quite that severe - but I did think that my habits developed from living in the US for 5 years and being a software engineer in a heavily US influenced tech sector would prove a significant challenge.

Yet, short of a few teething problems which I’ll go into, it’s been a breeze. At first it was definitely annoying to have to check ownership of every product I bought, but now I know most of them off by heart, making shopping easy.

In particular, allowing myself to keep using existing US products (e.g. my MacBook), while cancelling all US paid services was a sensible compromise.

Revelation 2: It has saved me a million pounds

Some entire product lines in supermarkets are US brands.

This is most apparent for certain products which can stay on the shelves for weeks (in the US grocery market these are called CPGs or ‘Consumer Packaged Goods’) like crisps, cereals and sweets. In fact, the companies behind these products often pay extra money to a supermarket to put them in a preferential spot (at adult eye line).

Initially, seeing a whole aisle full of products that were off-limits had me running up and down the aisle like a headless chicken.

It turns out, all you have to do is look down. Sure enough, you’ll likely find some supermarket own-brand products and some more local products (or just go to Lidl or Aldi).

It’s been 8 years since I last bought supermarket own-brand stuff regularly. It was fine back then, and maybe it’s my imagination but it’s actually better than I remember. Or perhaps brand products got worse?

Supermarkets aren’t the only place though - in all it’s cut my entire discretionary spending by a half.

Revelation 3: I didn’t need to go back to the Stone Age

There was no rule added preventing US software and services if free.

As a point of principle though, I felt that I should at least look for alternatives.

So I had some services I had previously switched over (due to privacy concerns):

Note:

• Ecosia is better than Google search in my experience for UK based users (you can set your locale to United Kingdom unlike Google), providing less US centric results without compromising the results
• I’d suggest using Proton as a Google account (Mail, Cal, Docs) replacement instead of Fastmail. I’m still using Fastmail as I paid for a bargain price for 36 months, but will likely switch when it ends, because Proton supports Docs but Fastmail doesn’t.

• /e/OS surprised me with how good it’s been, it’s basically Android with all the dodgy Google code removed. In other modified versions of Android, this can sometimes be an issue but it’s been executed so well and I haven’t run into any incompatibility issues at all
• Le Chat is a French equivalent to ChatGPT which is much faster. I’ve met a few technical folks who also seem to prefer it. Also, Le Chat est un excellent nom 🐱
• TfL Go is an amazing substitute for London public transport instructions. It places your current location on top of the classic TfL map and has a magic button to instantly see upcoming bus departures from the closest bus stops, which we use to know when the next bus will be at the stop outside.
• Picking Linux isn’t as intimidating to me as others, but for less tech savvy folks, Windows users should find Linux Mint easy to adapt to (and Mac users should try Ubuntu).

I’d be lying if I said I managed to wean myself off of all US tech software though (at least, not yet). I still occasionally use YouTube, Google Maps and Google Docs, but bit by bit, I’ll stop using those too.

Revelation 4: US products lead to more US products

I don’t have data to back up this hypothesis, but based on the experience so far, it does seem to be primarily US companies that overwhelmingly and disproportionately endorse other US products and services.

And when I say US companies here, I mean things we don’t typically think of as US companies:

• Google search results
• Referral Sites (i.e. “Best {PRODUCT}s to buy in {YEAR}”, like Tomsguide, Techradar)
• Most YouTube product review channels (especially tech)
• US owned TV (Sky/Netflix/Prime/AppleTV)
• FB/Insta/X timelines
• Ads on US ad networks (e.g. Google Ads)
• ChatGPT / Google Gemini

Without going into all of the details, all of these have vested interests to show you results from companies that pay them the most… which are often US-owned international giants, who can afford to spend more as they have a bigger market.

So in a weird kind of way, by avoiding getting information from these sources, I was unintentionally making it easier on myself.

What next?

Already, I feel happier, more human, and more ‘myself’.

So probably don’t expect me to stop 😉

Will upload a full list of product swaps when I have the time