Cracker Jacks No More. Frito Lay Goes Woke and it’s Not Looking Good for Sales!

I haven’t bought a box of Cracker Jack’s for a quarter of a century or more, probably decades more. There are other caramel popcorn and peanut snacks that are cheaper and better. I don’t generally eat this kind of thing anymore anyway.

So if I were to “boycott” Cracker Jack’s it would be a meaningless, empty gesture. Coming here and venting my outrage swearing to never buy a box of Cracker Jack’s again would be nothing but right wing virtue signalling and I refuse to consciously do that. I see a lot of that going on even in here on BWC and no, I’m not speaking directly to those people who on this page have vowed never to eat another Cracker Jack again.

I’m sure most of those people are sincere but … I have to confess I find that amusing and a little disturbing because it’s clear the idea that there are conservatives committing virtue signalling hasn’t occurred to the people doing it.

It’s not always a bad idea to give the Left as good as it gives us but virtue signalling is most definitely a tactic we should avoid. As Zo Rachel has often pointed out, it traps us in their agenda by giving credence to the stupid ideas the Left is so adept at promoting when we do exactly what they do but with a conservative spin. Like it or not, believe it or not, virtue signalling conservatives just validate Leftist virtue signalling. You can’t criticize what the Left does without hypocrisy if you do it yourself and I really enjoy criticizing what the Left does.

There are a lot of brand names I refuse to buy on a lot of grounds but the main one is a failure to deliver as good or better product than can be had elsewhere at an equal or better price.

A few years ago a black guy became the CEO of Domino’s Pizza and jumped that company fully onto the gun control/ anti-Second Amendment bandwagon. I have to assume that a company which does that would also support something like BLM and that’s why I made a point of the CEO being black. I don’t know that Domino’s Pizza is supporting BLM and I don’t care. It makes no difference to me.

I don’t like Domino’s pizzas particularly because they’re cheap, terrible pizzas. I do like pizza and even a bad pizza is generally better than no pizza at all. So if I have to choose between bad pizzas there are plenty of options besides Domino’s. When I heard about this gun control thing it was no skin off my nose to simply cross Domino’s off the list of bad pizzas I would be willing to buy.

I didn’t eat them anyway, I’ve only had maybe 3 Dominoes pizzas in my life. My “boycott” of Domino’s Pizza was a null issue to the company. They’re still in business and they don’t really care if I buy their pizzas or not.

There are brand names that I simply will never buy ever again but those are generally not off the list of consumer products for me on political grounds. I won’t spend more to get less with a different brand because I know that doesn’t have any effect and I have to be very careful how I spend my money. It’s not a matter of not giving those politically undesirable brands my money, it’s a matter of getting the most bang for the buck. Which means it’s a capitalist thing not a political thing, the market drives my choices by giving me better stuff at an equal or better price.

At the end of the day, I won’t patronize a brand that doesn’t deliver and however else you want to look at it that is a pure free enterprise position. No matter what else a company might do if they deliver good value they’re at least nominally on my side in the end.

An example of that is Seagate Technology brand hard drives. I wouldn’t buy a Seagate drive and if you gave one to me I would sell it before I ever considered using it.

I’ve worked in and with IT for decades. I’ve seen a LOT of hard drive failures. Because I work in the field I see a much larger sampling than most people buying things for their own use would see. Of all the drives I’ve had to replace due to failure over the years, Seagate hard drives make up about 95% of the total. Almost every time I’ve had to replace a drive I’ve told the owner that “I bet when I open up your machine I find a Seagate hard drive” and — I’ve been right. Knowing that, I’m not willing to give Seagate my money. My refusal to purchase Seagate drives has had little to no effect on the company and they’re still in business.

Let me add here that the cost of a hard drive is not a large factor. It does no good to warranty a drive for ten years if you lose the data on that drive and have to replace it with another inferior drive from the same company just to lose your data again. When it comes to hard drives it’s not the drive, it’s the data that is of paramount importance.

I don’t care what Seagate’s political position is. I usually buy Western Digital brand drives because over the years they’ve proven to be the best value for the money. I don’t care what Western’s political position is either. I’m not going to buy more expensive components and get less value no matter what*.

Because I know from personal life experience that “boycotting” something is totally ineffective empty gesture and if I do that it’s me not the company I’m boycotting that suffers most.

That’s not to say you should buy products from companies that hate you. You do what you think is best and if you can afford to buy something else that is of equal or lesser quality at a higher price you should consider yourself blessed and do what seems best to you.

Because it’s having the choice that’s important and that is what we’re all working towards at the end of the day. The Left wants to limit our choices to only those options they approve of and I refuse to let them set that bar where they want to. I’ll go with market pressures every time.

If Cracker Jack wants to insult and drive away their market that’s on them and I sincerely hope they suffer the rightful consequences of that stupid decision. I don’t buy them anyway.

*(Don’t get me wrong, other brand drives fail too. I have a drawer full of dead drives that I keep and when I have enough and the spare time I disassemble them for the rare earth magnets inside. I buy other brands than Seagate or I’d have a much bigger collection of rare earth drive magnets.)