What are some lesser known (so no Walmart, Nestle, Amazon etc) shitty, ethically bankrupt, evil companies?
What are some lesser known (so no Walmart, Nestle, Amazon etc) shitty, ethically bankrupt, evil companies?
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Mark all corporations off your list. Corporations don't care about the consumer. Only your money, which supports their shareholders.
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.
Yeah going public is often the death knell of real progressive action from companies.
I think we are mostly on the same page. I would say "owning the company" isn't the same as "in control of how the company works" when you're owned by a giant parent company. They may still "own" it but they haven't effectively been in direct control of its current and future operations since 2000.
Yes, and they were in Palestine before then, and after the IPO.
That's a fair take, but if we're going back to the 80's and 90's, I personally am going to cut them some slack because it was a lot harder to really be up to date about issues like what was going on in Palestine back then. We had more independent media, sure, but it was far more difficult for the average American to get informed about those kind of issues without the modern internet.
The death of Rachel Corrie at the hands of Israelis stealing Palestinian land was in 2003 and hardly was a blip in American media. Just from my own memories from the time far fewer people were aware of it even being an issue. I remember being pissed but most people didn't know or didn't seem to care that they murdered a US citizen.
The modern pressure on Ben & Jerry's is because millions of people are aware of it now thanks to the modern internet and are getting involved in the pressure. Back then? I strongly suspect Ben & Jerry's probably got a handful of letters about it, and whether the owners actually ever saw such letters or read articles about what was going on in Palestine is up for debate. Not everyone can know anything, and there was truly a dearth of media about it in the US at the time. By the time it was well-known enough for large amounts of people to be actively pressuring them, they were owned by genuinely evil assholes, not just oblivious halfway decent people.
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.