To say everyone should boycott House of Whisky

[Tillow4ever]

I’ve just seen that a company called House of Whisky has created a post on the ALCOHOL SUPPORT board to advertise their company and talk about how they ship their whiskies worldwide etc.

AIBU to think this is a really scummy, low and morally corrupt practice and we should make it backfire on them and boycott their company?

I think it’s disgusting they’ve gone onto a forum intended for people to get help with their alcohol addiction to advertise alcohol for sale. Obviously I have reported their post as it’s advertising anyway, but hopefully people will see this and choose to shop elsewhere with someone who won’t stoop to such depths.

I have marked the image as sensitive (might take a while to appear) - if you have a problematic relationship with alcohol, I would advise you don’t open it. I have only included it as proof of my claim, I don’t want to advertise them further.

How else do you suggest I make people aware of the ethical bad practice of a company? If they don’t get called out on it, they’ll carry on.

If someone reads this post and chooses to use them anyway, that’s on them. Hopefully more people will read it and choose to actively avoid them.

FGS @Tillow4ever you might as well have stuck a giant bellows under the original post and fanned it

MN HQ quickly deleted the old post, it was sorted, no one would have noticed.

But here you are with your podium telling everyone to join your "boycott"....

Oh you can read her mind?

I suspect the person posting the advert was being thick rather than intentionally malicious.

I would say I'd boycott but a. I don't drink alcohol and b. even in my drinking days, I didn't drink whiskey, so saying I was boycotting would be rather meaningless.

Yes of course I do, I mean it's pretty simple isn't it? 😳

I wonder why you're not understanding mine?

If MNHQ allowed free advertising they wouldn't have removed it in the first place.

The OP putting it back has just moved it to a different thread.

You just acknowledged it may not even be the company behind it and could just be a troll. Either way you are now doing their work for them, if they did it on purpose they didn’t care what people thought and you are helping them trend on mumsnet anyway

Well you don’t have to join me in it. Hell. You didn’t have to comment to keep it in “active”.

Where’s your line? If I found evidence of a company using slave labour and posted to say don’t use these because of this, is that ok? Or should we not draw attention to that either? What about if I found a company advertising vapes, alcohol or porn to teenagers - should I not point that out to people so they can choose not to use them?

I would also email or twitter or whatever that company's ceo. It will be someone from their marketing department and quite frankly they should be sacked for it.

I find this post useful. I have bought from them before, but I am always interested in finding out companies who employ these kind of marketing tactics, and I now wouldn’t buy from them again.

The OP is not advertising the company, she’s making people aware the company employ unethical marketing tactics, surely these are important conversations to have?

You're not a one woman crusade and you don't own the website.

So best to leave it to MNHQ considering you've completely done the reverse of what you were aiming for.

You're literally advertising a company that most of us have never heard of.

Hard agree, nasty work 🤢

Another person said it might be a troll. I said I hoped they were right. Didn’t acknowledge it might not ge the company behind it. I don’t think it was a troll. But I still hope it was as that’s slightly less horrid.

Thank you. I did my best to make that clear - it felt too important to ignore.

As a recovering alkie myself (3yrs, 7ms, 10 days) I would have just reported that post and checked that it had been deleted just as you have done.

If you or anyone reading this thread feel strongly enough you could contact the company directly and give them a piece of your mind. I might even do that myself if I get bored.

The world is full of unprincipled people and we are confronted by their acts every single day. I can't let everything get to me because, guess what.... that's when my precious sobriety would be threatened.

How do I - or you for that matter - know that most people on this website have never heard of them? I had heard of them before this. Someone else has said they’ve bought from them before.

You can agree with me or not. I wanted to draw attention to shody ethical marketing practices. I’ve done that. I cannot control what people choose to do with that information.

Congratulations on your sobriety. You are doing amazingly well.

Thank you for your insight into how you would feel. I wonder how someone new into their recovery journey would feel. Or someone having a bad day where they’re considering a drink?

I wish you luck in staying sober.

I would just report it and leave it at that. It's obviously an error, a fairly embarrassing one, but boycotting somewhere most people have likely never even heard of sounds a bit OTT, and all in all you've likely given them free publicity.

I'm glad you reported this - I'm a recovering addict too. It can be incredibly triggering seeing your substance of choice in unexpected places (ie a support board for recovering alcoholics) like a jump scare.

How is the op doing there work for them? I expect most ppl are decent and this post would make them boycott this business rather than buy from them.

God forbid anyone tries to make ppl aware of unethical behaviour. Let’s all always sit back and do nothing

They obviously weren’t worried about that when they posted on the board

I think the op is going to give them less business rather than more by this post.

You’ve no idea though. But rather than just deleting it before anyone really saw it and giving them no advertisement, their business name is now still popular on here an hour later. And they had likely posted controversially on there on purpose in the first place.

Not necessarily. This is the kind of thing that automated bots sometimes do. Websites like this are continually bombarded with bots trying to create user accounts so that they can post adverts. If this is a bot, they have clearly got their targeting wrong. Posting this ad on a forum trying to help people struggling with alcohol is clearly stupid, to say the least. But it may not have been a deliberate act by a human.

then report it?