Jad's Thoughts

I’m not proposing a different or a better answer and there can be many answers of course but I personally don’t believe in boycotting as an answer although I’m a natural boycotter but that because I prefer supporting local and Arabic goods or because I simply cannot afford it but certainly not because I hate other goods.

There has been some talks about boycotting different popular brands and businesses starting from McDonalds, Dell, Burger King, Starbucks and many other very popular brands but I don’t really think it’s a good idea to boycott any.

The interesting thing about the International brands is that they do their best to hire locals which is good to our economy and good to our own people, If you go to your favorite local restaurant you will find an expatriate waiter, chef, cleaner so practically we don’t care about ourselves to start with to boycott foreign investment when they do hire us instead of expatriates.

If you go to McDonalds, Burgerking, Hardees, Starbucks, Costa, Dell or your favorite place to boycott you will find that there are Jordanians there with a zero rate of foreigners! Do you know what that means? lets talk about fast food restaurants only to limit the damage, imagine if all of them decided to hire foreigners, first they will make more money because usually foreigners get less salary then Jordanians, Secondly we will increase the unemployment rate and practically that would affect university students because they do give priority in a way or another to university students.

Maybe before considering boycotting any international business we should have a national campaign to encourage local restaurants to hire Jordanians only or am I asking for too much? ok I’m not going to negotiate 100% Jordanian, 20% at least should be for females and 10% at least for disabled, I’m not going to dream, I just want to be practical so let’s ask them to make it fifty-fifty.

Another thing, there are brands without a decent alternative and there are brands that I’d support no matter what or who they support simply because they support some causes that I do personally support, so don’t ask me to boycott Intel, AMD, Dell or IBM.

Another another thing, We should always think in a positive way even during crisis, we should be thinking in supporting local brands, lets build a list of good alternatives to those brands that you want to boycott, If you are coffee addict I’d suggest Full Cup Coffee 5th circle or News & Coffee first circle and I can tell you that I’m extremely addicted to coffee with rate of one to one and a half liter a day!

it’s always good to support local brands and local business especially when they are good and the mentioned alternatives are seriously good and you can count on me regarding this, however I’m not sure about the other brands or business, there are things that you simply cannot boycott because there is no alternative even to support if you want to go positive.

Finally, you cannot boycott when you are a consumer not a producer and you cannot boycott if you don’t support your local business, brands and your own people by hiring them instead of importing others.

let our reaction starts with loving ourselves instead of hating others without even starting to love each other else it’s all temporally reactions that would vanish within days and then we have to start the loop all over again.

Time to go, Dominos pizza guy should be there any second.