Its the Pitts: A one man ban

by: Lee Pitts

I suppose readers have heard Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos made a commitment to give $30 million over a five-year period to North Carolina State University for research into manufacturing fake meat. 

For Bezos, $30 million is the equivalent of a $20 bill to me and you because his wealth is currently estimated by Forbes to be $215 billion, which would rank him as the second richest human on Earth. This is even after he gave his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, $38 billion in Amazon stock in a divorce settlement.

For some reason, Bezos has beef with beef, and he seems to hate cowboys. Maybe it’s because when he worked on his grandparents’ ranch in Cotulla, Texas early in his life, the rough and tumble cowboys did not play nice with the dweeb. At five feet and seven inches, Bezos does not appear to be someone who would strike fear in the heart of an average cowboy. 

The computer geek previously established the Bezos Earth Fund which is the largest philanthropic commitment ever to fight climate change and protect nature. The fund will supposedly disburse $10 billion by 2030 to make the world more sustainable and “create a future in which everyone can thrive.” 

Everyone except cattlemen, of course.

Because of his support for fake beef, I am announcing I will never do business with Amazon ever again. Nor will I be a passenger on his space tourism venture, Blue Origin. Folks who get Amazon packages daily from the U.S. Post Office might think my boycott will create a real hardship for me, but I don’t buy a dozen things per year on the internet and less than half would be courtesy of Amazon. 

I prefer to buy direct, and I don’t need a middleman who wants to see fake beef replace the real thing. For the past 50 years, my career has centered around the beef business, and I don’t need to enrich someone who wants to put me out of business.

One might think my boycott of Amazon will have little effect on Mr. Bezos, but I’m warning him several of my boycotts in the past have put many huge companies out of business.

For example, I pulled my money out of Washington Mutual and Indy Mac Bank and both firms declared bankruptcy shortly thereafter. Other companies I’ve boycotted include Enron, Lehman Brothers, Silicone National Bank, Bed Bath and Beyond, World Com and Toys “R” Us, and we all know what happened to them, don’t we? 

I stopped buying underwear and Craftsman tools from Sears when they started making everything in China, and my boycott bankrupted them too.

Another rich guy who is heavily investing in fake beef is Bill Gates, and he now owns the most farmland of anybody in America at 269,000 acres. I started boycotting Gates several years ago when an airline gave me a free Windows-based computer which I tried and then quickly gave to someone I didn’t like. 

When I began my boycott, Gates was the richest man in the world, but since the beginning of my boycott, Forbes says Gates has fallen all the way down to the number eight spot at $135 billion.

Poor guy.

These rich dudes shouldn’t question the power of my previous boycotts. 

When I switched to Wranglers, it almost devastated Levi’s. I stopped buying Chicken Soup books when they stopped printing my columns, and sure enough, they went bankrupt too.

Closer to home, in the cattle business, I never bought or sold a hoof from Eastern Livestock, Easterday or Millenkamp and all three crashed, fired and burned. So too did the Tattooed Chef when I swore to never get a tattoo or to do anything in the kitchen. 

Chrysler declared bankruptcy years ago and it was probably because I only bought Oldsmobiles, but then they went out of business when I switched to Buicks.

I’ve also never bought a single thing from Starbucks or WalMart, and I’m considering boycotting Costco because they recently hiked the price for admission. I am presently boycotting Russia, dental implants and TikTok – whatever that is.

If anyone sees Bezos please warn him because of his support of the fake meat industry and my resulting boycott, he’ll soon be homeless, panhandling on some street corner and begging for my forgiveness.