While I find the wiki-style site for European alternatives ( https://www.goeuropean.org/ ) very helpful and have started using it fairly regularly, I feel like it misses an option to just look up a brand or company and easily find out where it’s from. Maybe that is already an option and I haven’t found it. If so, please point me in that direction.

If not, what I would hope for, is a quick and simple place to check if a given brand or company is perhaps American owned (or more generally where it’s profit ultimately goes). For example, I seriously doubt my mother in law would be able to know that Toblerone is an American owned brand. The current wiki pre-supposes that users already know this.

The average EU citizen is in his mid 40s and likely not all that tech savvy. Purchasing power skews towards older folks anyway, so it should be a goal to get this demographic on board. Does anyone have a starting off point where one can easily find the information on a specific company or brand on the go? Could something like this be added to the current site ( https://www.goeuropean.org/ )?

  • klu9@lemmy.ca
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    17 hours ago

    It’s good to support democratic values with our purchases.

    But I wonder, for example re smartphones, how many of these alternatives are just European badges on a collection of parts made in China (even less of a democracy than Trump-ruled USA).

    Taking Punkt as an example, I did various Qwant searches and came no closer to finding out where their phones and/or components are actually manufactured. (Very clear where the company is headquartered; “Swiss” and “Switzerland” are mentioned every 10 words :D , .ch domain, office in Lugano. But they never say that’s where the phones are manufactured.)

    • jjpamsterdam@feddit.orgOP
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      17 hours ago

      This is one of the reasons I would really like to have some degree of transparency, at least more than right now.

      Modern supply chains are often complex and cross several countries and continents. Nonetheless I would really enjoy having some place to - at a glance - find out where the profit centre for a given product or service is, perhaps with additional information like manufacturers and suppliers, if this is public information.

      As things stand I always have to manually look up all this information. Sometimes it’s even hard to find out who the owner and/or manufacturer of a specific brand really is. I’d like to have an alternative to this manual search that might even work for people like my mother in law.

    • pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 hours ago

      It’s good to support democratic values with our purchases.

      That’s why I only buy Chinese.

      But I wonder, for example re smartphones, how many of these alternatives are just European badges on a collection of parts made in China (even less of a democracy than Trump-ruled USA).

      Only because you’re brainwashed and sheltered by your state media to hate China. Your handle makes it looks like you are Canadian, y’all illegally arrested the head of Huawei and kicked Huawei out your country, a smartphone manufacturer that is a literal co-operative enterprise.