Believing and pretending that McDs and Walmart are dying off and unpopular is a different thing though.

Or things like "Everyone I know is switching to Whole Foods from Walmart, this means Whole Foods will take over in a year's time and Walmart will die off".

Just to add Walmart’s revenue is almost half a trillion dollars. It’s double Amazons revenue. They employ over 2.2 million people.

I don’t shop there and a lot of HN probably doesn’t. A LOT of other people do.

Walmart's profits are a fraction of amazon's, though.

Yeah that's not true... Amazon's net income for the last quarter (ending on May 31 2019) was 3.561B, while Walmart's net income for the last quarter (ending on April 31 2019) was $3.842B

16/15 is still a "fraction" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why would you possibly think that? It’s not true.

I wonder if you are a "type".

If you don't want products and services from Microsoft, Walmart and McDonald's, all 3 companies who don't seem to advertise much- do you find yourself buying products from big advertisers?

I don't find these companies low quality, so I'm wondering what would make you avoid them.

I'm not sure where you get the impression that these three companies don't advertise much.

In any case, nobody should have to patronize a company if they don't want to, whatever their motivation. The problem with the big tech companies is that one so frequently doesn't have a choice. I may not want to buy from MS, but some bit of hardware I'd like to use only supports Windows drivers and some bit of paperwork I need to fill out is distributed as a Word doc whose formatting doesn't render correctly outside of MS Office.

In all fairness, one can avoid Walmart and McDonalds if one wants to, but Google and Facebook are as hard to avoid as Microsoft.

How is Facebook hard to avoid?

Not hard until you want to become involved in an organization that happens to use Facebook as their primary platform for broadcasting information. Or maybe you really would like to see photos of your newborn niece or nephew. Depends on your situation.

The baby pictures are an issue. I had to make it clear that if they didn't text or e-mail me the photos, I would miss them. Also that I didn't want to miss them, but I was OK with it. Finally, I asked them to also add them to a Google Photos shared album for the family.

It's worked out well enough. Eliminating Google sounds too painful to me, so I'm glad my family agreed to share their photos on Google's platform for me.

I absolutely find McDs pretty low quality. I'm not saying they're bad, or people that eat there are. I do shop at Walmart and do use Windows at work.

It just depends on my given needs for a given thing. As to Windows, I'd rather be on linux or mac, but there are a couple things I work on that are core to the business absolutely tethered to windows.

McDonalds spends over 1.5B a year in advertising. Thats the most in advertising spend of any restaurant, with Taco Bell in second at a third of McD, and Dominos, Subway, and Burger King at a fifth.

But you most definitely want to invest in them, since that's where the dollars are going.

this article isn't about buying microsoft products and you've exactly missed the point of the person to whom you're responding: do you want to own shares of mcdonalds, walmart, microsoft? i do.