Why I Cut Up My BP and Shell Cards

When companies act badly, kick ’em to the curb.

Wikimedia Commons

Not too long ago, BP sent me a notice that they were going to start charging me to send me bills. So after more than 20 years of doing business with them, I went online to close my account.

When to I got to the end of the process, I was bumped to a screen that, well, maybe meant I’d closed the account or maybe not. So I called them up (the account was not closed) and toward the end of that process the call was dropped. I cut up the card and trashed it.

Over the next several months BP sent multiple mailings trying to get me to use the card again. Apparently, mail isn’t that expensive after all! I recycled all that stuff.

So then last month, Shell emails me, saying I have a new card coming and asking me to set up a portal of some kind. I have no use for a portal. They send me bills, I pay them, it works just fine.

The day of the change-up came and went. My old card was dead, and the new one never came. I called the number on the back of the card and the machine told me I had a wait time of 49 minutes, so wouldn’t I rather have them call me back? When I told the machine no, I’d hold, suddenly my wait time dropped to below 15 minutes.

The bastards were lying to get me off the line, knowing a good percentage of callbacks never connect. That’s how it is these days.

Well, I ended up talking to a fellow who tells me my new card has a different service number. Rather than transferring me, he recites it to me. So after more than 35 years of business, that card got cut up, too.

See, the thing is, I spent my early driving years paying for gas in cash, and I haven’t forgotten how. And now that I’m an old guy, I have other cards I can use. So AMF! (That’s French: Adieu, mon frère!)

It’s been more than a decade now since I kicked Amazon out of bed, too. They were selling a literal child abuse manual, instructing parents how to beat their children, which had led directly to kids’ deaths. Despite pleas from across the country and internationally to delist the thing, they kept selling it. And they do to this day. So I left them behind.

And you know what? The sun comes up anyhow.

I will say that last year I needed a very specific type of power converter for travel, which I could only find from a German company that only sold internationally via Amazon. I held my nose and made the purchase. Damn thing didn’t work. I reckon I deserved that.

I’ve abandoned Meta, too. And again, it hasn’t caused me the first bit of trouble.

My point is, we need to listen to the Dead Kennedys. If our motto is “Give me convenience or give me death,” eventually that convenience runs out.

And once they have you hooked on convenience, it’s all too easy to think you really do need your refrigerator to tell you when you’re out of milk, or some computer program to read and write your emails. And that’s when they have you by the short and curlies.

Because I write for a living, I do get asked how AI has impacted my career. If anything, it’s created more demand for what I do. My attitude is, so-called “AI” (artificial intelligence doesn’t actually exist) solves exactly zero problems I have, and would create new ones if I used it. So I just don’t bother with it.

You may sense a pattern emerging here.

We have more power collectively than we seem to admit. Certainly more than we’re using.

Take Disney, for example. When they exposed themselves as fascist-okaybymes, we had the power to utterly destroy them. Because, think about it — quite literally nobody needs anything Disney sells. If enough people had simply decided, “Done with Disney now,” we could have ended them. And that would have sent mega-Luigi shivers through the corporate aether.

When it comes to corporations acting badly, it’s my experience that most of the time it’s possible to just give them the kiss-off and forget about them. No marching, no editorials, no fist-shaking, just don’t go round there anymore and move on to other things.

When you get right down to it, what makes life worth living is people anyway. Not convenience. Not toys. Certainly not brands. A small and simple life is a wonderful life.

That doesn’t mean we can always walk away. Obviously, I couldn’t make my own clothes or grow my own food even if I wanted to, so I gotta get them somewhere. But in this culture, we have tremendous power to cut the bad actors loose — a helluva lot more than we’re using.

So my suggestion is, when companies become predatory and extractive, when they start lying to you, when they support evil people, when they do harmful things and know it and don’t care, maybe don’t wait for the boycott to be organized. Maybe ask yourself if you really do need them.

Perhaps you do. But if you don’t, how about just shutting the door and walking away? There can be tremendous freedom and peace in that. And when we do walk away, and we see that our lives are not really impoverished by it, we discover something about ourselves and the world and how we want to live our lives.

Just something to think about.

Peace -ptz