College Board. Maker of the SAT
Fuck College Board with a rake. Seriously awful when college is already so expensive.
The POM Wonderful company
Along with Fiji Water and Teleflora.
Basically anything touched by Stewart Resnick, the wealthiest American “farmer” and water pirate.
Mark all corporations off your list. Corporations don’t care about the consumer. Only your money, which supports their shareholders.
Businesses exist for 1 reason: To make money.
Save the Children might have an objection to that.
Are they a business?
Yes, non-profits are still a type of “business” and many of them absolutely do not help their supposed causes as much as they portray. Susan G. Komen Foundation went from a darling of the non-profit world to people wondering whether they really helped women at all.
I think they’re using Save the Children as an example because ostensibly 74% of their revenue actually goes directly to aiding people, and 26% is employee compensation, advertising, and so on.
I mean, the whole “no ethical consumption under capitalism” or “all corporate ethics are fake” type stuff has plenty of truth to it, but at the same time, one does have to get any good or service not made oneself from somewhere, and corporations are made up of people with different views about what they’re personally willing to do, or how much they think taking unethical actions even is the profitable thing. So, there is still room for some businesses to be worse than others.
Ben & Jerry’s was traditionally a “good” company for example, but what killed that was them getting bought out by an evil company, Unilever. This path is the path a lot of “good” companies take when they go bad.
We had to pressure them about occupied Palestine.
To be fair, Unilever has owned Ben & Jerry’s since April 2000.
Unless you were pressuring them about that issue before April 2000, you were actually dealing with Unilever.
Which is literally my point.
Published date: 20 July 2021 14:27 BST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_%26_Jerry's#Unilever_era
In April 2000, Ben & Jerry’s sold itself to British multinational food giant Unilever for $326 million
In 2010, Jostein Solheim, a Unilever executive from Norway, was appointed CEO.
In 2018, Matthew McCarthy, previously a Unilever executive, was appointed CEO, replacing Solheim.
You’re missing the point here. It hasn’t been in control of the original people who ran the company for a long, long time. It’s literally been being run by Unilever executives.
_The brand said it would end sales in the territories
spoiler-title
after years ::: of campaigning by activists allied with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign._
I think I see what you’re saying but they still owned the company.
However,
When did Ben and Jerry’s become a public company? In 1978, with $12,000, Ben & Jerry’s opened in a vacant gas station. The first franchise followed in 1981, distribution outside Vermont began in 1983, and the company went public in 1984.
So maybe that’s the biggest issue.
Like the other comment said, I would love to know some morally appropriate companies, that way I can choose to use them. Boycotting is nice but if you lack the knowledge of where to shop then it’s a fruitless effort
There are large companies, many of them in Germany, who are owned by foundations. Perhaps the best known is Bosch, which is almost entirely owned by a charitable foundation. Another very large one is ZF Friedrichshaven, owned by the Zeppelin Foundation. They don’t do any consumer products, but are one of the world’s largest players in the automotive industry.
Disney decided to keep their dei policies so that’s something.
But they also cut a trans story to avoid controversy and probably other shit things I cant remember atm. So take what you will I guess
Isn’t that the same company which refused to pay a guy compensation for choking because he used a disney+ free trial and also completely ruined copyright law
Yeah. That’s one of the shitty things I forgot
They don’t follow morality, they follow money. They go for whichever gets them more money and/or less criticism.
Disney didn’t. Their shareholders did.
Valid thing to want, but I get the feeling this thread is about alerting people to horrible companies they might not realize are horrible… like my comment about Trader Joe’s.
For the big makers of pseudo-science based bullshit medicine, see Weleda (naturopathy, anthroposophy) and Boiron (homeopathy).
riot games settles for 100 million dollars after sexually harassing its own employees.
lesser known
It’s lesser known to people who go outside
And tbh I never knew about that so thanks for sharing!
I want to add to this their absolutely egregious forced kernel-level anti-cheat. It demands full privileged access to a user’s machine, and unlike some competing systems, it doesn’t want to go away when the game is no longer being played.
The assurance this won’t be used or exploited for ultra-malicious purposes across the globe by a corporation owned ultimately by the CCP is…
“Just trust me, bro.”
They’re also 100% Chinese owned. It’s the major turnoff for me with their Path of Exile titles.
I met a guy who really wanted to work at riot games and found no issue with their culture. And the longer I spent talking to him, the more I realize… Ah, you’re an edge lord. Of course you would like the company.
Sinclair group in the US, bought up basically every local news station and began inserting propaganda into scripts as stories. Highly insidious because the older population generally trusted their local news anchors more than the national outlets.
GEO group, one of the largest private prison corporations that also manages ice detention facilities and many mental institutions, not sure I need to say much more.
Ah yes, the Sinclair “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy” foreshadowing
I’m now boycotting GEO Group. Henceforth, I will only do IRL heist missions in places where there’s a public prison option.
Sinclair is literally why I don’t have a local news station anymore, and also part of why after 10 years of working in local television news and being promoted to higher and higher positions I was finally like “fuck this, I’m out” and started working at a fucking Subway.
The Sinclair monopoly is an invisible part of why Trump is in office. Local news doesn’t really exist anymore.
Goodwill specifically hires disabled people under the guise of “giving them work experience”, but it’s really because they can get away with paying them less.
Chick-Fil-A supports conversion therapy.
Just to be clear, Goodwill is notorious for this, but any company can do this. The law allows the disabled to be paid less because they cannot complete the same job as fast. Essentially saying that getting the job done faster means you deserve to live more. It’s insanity that takes advantage of the weakest and most desperate in society under the guise of helping them. Because they cannot get as much work done to their mental or physical disabilities they deserve to be underpaid even though they worked a 40 hour week? It’s a fucking joke and a slap in the face to anyone disabled, but it’s the law. Once again, tons of companies abuse this, Goodwill is just well known for abusing it more than others.
I understand the viewpoint, but the alternative is that disabled people get hired way less or not at all. A real solution would be to reduce our dependence on capitalism or something, but that’s not likely.
God I (as a disabled woman) am SO sick of seeing this take every time this conversation happens, like it’s chill and okay to give us less rights.
Yeah, I really love people telling me I’m worth less than a “normal” person because my brain works differently so I should be grateful for whatever some capitalist shithead doles out to me.
I think their main point was that under capitalism, people will only ever be viewed for their economic utility - exploitation of affected groups is inherent to that reduction in a human’s rights and their contributions beyond menial labour.
So the take isnt defending the status quo, it’s saying how the best case scenario in an inherently soulless and uncaring system is to be paid cents on the dollar, and that more intervention to secure better pay, respect, and working rights, by definition, will always move further and further away from “capitalism” in it’s purest, most discriminatory forms.
True, both options under capitalism are pretty bad.
The one sole benefit to the disabled is being able to work for Goodwill for a few hours a week will be unlikely to go over their income limits so their SSI and so they can stay on SSI and still work at least a little to supplement their obscenely meager disability income. SSDI recipients fare far better and are literally allowed to have income as long as it isn’t worked. Meaning a rich SSDI recipient can stop working but still make a boatload of money off of investment income.
What are the acronyms?
SSI = Supplemental Security Income
SSDI = Social Security Disability Insurance
Sometime around the mid 2010s, I worked at one of Goodwill’s busiest locations in the country. So busy we got calls almost every day complaining about the giant fucking traffic snake of donors blocking streets as they all lined up in their suburban safety bubbles to dump their literal garbage into our blue bins.
Absolute shitbox of a store. Run down, dirty, and always a mess. Especially the shoes and toys section. I already hated retail customers but that really sealed the deal. Just a bunch of broke ass motherfucking customers making broke ass workers days even harder. Two of my full-time coworkers were homeless. Those were just the ones I knew about because I worked by their side every day. Despite our poverty wages and grinding hours, I worked with some genuinely good people who cared about each other. Brian, I know you’ll never see this but I hope you’re still alive and got the help you needed. Daniel, you are far too intelligent and capable to waste your life there. I hope you got out.
A few times I had to visit the allegedly original Goodwill store. You might think if there’s one store corporate cares about enough to put a bit of polish on, it would be that one. But no. It looked like the most dystopian shopping experience imaginable. Crumbling architecture, merchandise strewn all over as if the customers were in a fight for their lives, and just like my store, a bunch of workers who looked ragged, tired, and barely holding it together inside. And there worked at least one young woman with Down Syndrome who I reckon was making about a third of my not-even-close-to-livable wage of $10/hr. I was starting to suspect this Goodwill place isn’t in the business of good will. Then I visited the Training and Education Center which also serves as their corporate HQ in Seattle.
It was modern. Spacious. Clean. Safe. Nobody looked poor or unhappy. Any illusions I might have held about Goodwill were entirely shattered beyond any doubt.
I’ll never shop or donate there again and I’ll take every opportunity to tell anyone who will listen why they should stop patronizing the most for-profit nonprofit I’ve ever worked for.
Fuck you, Goodwill. Fuck you forever.
Where would you recommend donating instead?
Depending on your feelings about the Catholic Church, you might look into donating to the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
Where I grew up there were also some smaller independent thrift stores run by neighborhood religious organizations or other nonprofits on their own steam. You might check for any in your area.
I was under the knowledge that goodwill pays less so that those who do work there don’t lose their benefits, which require you to basically make nearly 0 income. Has this changed?
The lower minimum wage for disabled people isn’t limited to those on benefits.
Similarly, Salvation Army is a whackadoo pseudochristian religious cult masquerading publicly as a thrift store. They’re only about one degree removed from the Mormon church in terms of sequestering, abuse (sexual and otherwise), and manipulation of their members and those in their care. And of course also vehemently espouse the entire conservative fuckhead smorgasboard of homophobic, transphobic, sexist, anti-union views. They claim to do “good works” and superficially may even occasionally accomplish this, but it’s always couched in their hateful religious bullshit which really rather undermines the point.
Yes, Chick-Fil-A is also a famously fundamentalist wingnut organization. Being for conversation therapy is only the start of it.
As is Hobby Lobby – The nation’s only retail chain whose owners were busted for attempting to illegally smuggle stolen religious artifacts from the middle East for display in their personal bible museum!
I think we’d compile a shorter list if we tried to name wholesome, respectable companies.
Nah, we have loads of great companies here in the UK.
Didn’t the UK develop the first large evil corporation?
It sure did!
among more brutality around the world, yes
I use good on you app to find ethical, bio brands. It’s hard to find good companies, but they do exist.
what is a bio brand?
I haven’t heard of this app, will defo check it out
Virtucon. It’s a large telecom that actually is just a front for a doctor who is always trying to do messed up stuff. He’s known for cruelly strapping EM radiation transmitters onto fish and then getting them really riled up.
Lmao, that name though. “Our virtue is a con.”
The owner is a doctor, but they went to evil medical school. I’ve heard his firing practices are pretty harsh too, just drops people with no warning.
Wasn’t there an OSHA case filed by an employee who was very badly burned there?
This sounds like a plot point from the OA.
Adobe.
Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s foray into military hardware and an ever-present surveillance state. Some of the first hardware they rolled out were surveillance towers for the US border patrol.
So Mark Zuckerberg officially isn’t the only giant pile of shit connected to Oculus, the original owner is a fucking pile of shit, too.
Trader Joe’s is also thought of by many people as “liberal” and a “good company.” Go learn about the conditions in their warehouses and you’ll find out that’s not true at all. I had a friend who worked TJ’s warehouse in Lacey, WA and all he had was fucking horror stories and how the warehouse was owned and run by MAGA fucks.
So yeah fuck Trader Joe’s.
That’s a shame about Brave, does anyone have an reccomendations for another browser that reduces digital fingerprinting in a similar way?
Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s foray into military hardware and an ever-present surveillance state. Some of the first hardware they rolled out were surveillance towers for the US border patrol.
Same vibe as Palantir by Peter Thiel, big data analytics platform used by many defense/security organizations. Far right pseudo-libertarians love abusing Tolkien’s lore, sadly.
Stopped shopping at Trader Joe’s after their anti union shenanigans. Shame because we love their food
I have found a small amount of Trader Joe’s food labelled under different brand names at WinCo. Same companies producing the food, just boxed and bagged with a different name.
To be clear, WinCo also has it’s own issues.
Let’s keep that surveillance state alive because nothing screams democracy like never trusting anyone!
From under-staffing, to threatening managers to do more with less, to refusing to allow resources for security. They treat people like shit, their customers like shit, and try to undercut their suppliers which leads to half ass quality goods.
Last Week Tonight did a story about dollar stores:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM
Yeah, they’re as bad as you’d expect.
Its worse than you would think…
Not the video I was looking for but it proves the point…
Isn’t this the entire “dollar store” industry? My understanding was that these kinds of thing were the entire reason that business model was profitable. Or does this company do it worse than say dollar general or something does?
Menards. They have a history of dumping waste illegally and then daring the DNR to sue them. One example:
That’s the one store Alec of Technology Connections refers to…
They’re popular in Wisconsin and Wisconsin-adjecent states. If I didn’t know the details, I would prefer to go to a local chain over Home Depot or Lowes or whatever, but, yeah.
