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.
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.
Let’s keep that surveillance state alive because nothing screams democracy like never trusting anyone!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
I use good on you app to find ethical, bio brands. It’s hard to find good companies, but they do exist.
I haven’t heard of this app, will defo check it out
what is a bio brand?
For the big makers of pseudo-science based bullshit medicine, see Weleda (naturopathy, anthroposophy) and Boiron (homeopathy).
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.
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.
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?
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…
Stickermule and uline
https://slate.com/business/2024/07/sticker-mule-ceos-pro-trump-maga-email-surprised-employees.html
After stickermule went full magat the owner started to dox people who left negative reviews or spoke out against them.
https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial
A previously unreported boom in profits for the shipping supply giant Uline has provided the funds for a deeply conservative Midwestern family to bankroll anti-democracy causes around the country.
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.
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.
Ah yes, the Sinclair “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy” foreshadowing
The Sinclair monopoly is an invisible part of why Trump is in office. Local news doesn’t really exist anymore.
I’m now boycotting GEO Group. Henceforth, I will only do IRL heist missions in places where there’s a public prison option.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
DuPont. Here’s just a little tidbit:
Between 2007 and 2014 there were 34 accidents resulting in toxic releases at DuPont plants across the U.S., with a total of eight fatalities.[93] Four employees died of suffocation in a Houston, Texas, accident involving leakage of nearly 24,000 pounds (11,000 kg) of methyl mercaptan.[94] As a result, the company became the largest of the 450 businesses placed into the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s “severe violator program” in July 2015.
In Anniston, Alabama, plaintiffs in a 2002 lawsuit provided documentation showing that the local Monsanto factory knowingly discharged both mercury and PCB-laden waste into local creeks for over 40 years.[220] In 1969 Monsanto dumped 45 tons of PCBs into Snow Creek, a feeder for Choccolocco Creek, which supplies much of the area’s drinking water, and buried millions of pounds of PCB in open-pit landfills located on hillsides above the plant and surrounding neighborhoods.
These are the kind of companies that inspired the cartoon villains of the 1980s that just dump pollution because.
DuPont is also responsible for Teflon, which is what’s typically used in “non-stick” cookware. It’s unclear what its long-term effects are (I.e. if it’s even safe to cook with), and it’s also one of those lovely forever chemicals that doesn’t break down properly.
Bad bad bad.
I’ve read a bit about Teflon. My understanding is that the big health hazard is during the application process, primarily for the factory workers - you really don’t want to breath aerosolized uncured Teflon, or get it in your eyes. It’s not the most hazardous industrial chemical out there, I don’t think there’s any particular ethical issue with manufacturing products with Teflon as long as workers are provided PPE. If it’s a sweatshop product well then there are obviously a lot of ethical issues.
Once it’s cured it’s chemically inert (which is kind of the whole point) - I’m not aware of any research showing that the human body can absorb any harmful chemicals from cured Teflon - basically your stomach acid and digestive tract bacteria can’t do anything to it. You shouldn’t worry overmuch about being harmed by cooking in a Teflon-coated pan, it’s not a heavy metal or anything like that.
That said, a deteriorating Teflon coating can be a hazard. The material is fairly stiff and again, your digestive system can’t break it down. Any small particles should (hopefully) pass through, but larger flakes could get stuck somewhere and then… well your body can’t break it down. It’s going to be there causing a blockage until something dislodges it, it’s not going to bend very much, and it might have sharp enough edges to irritate or damage the surrounding tissue.
And yeah, nothing breaks it down naturally, so it is just going to be in the world forever, gradually eroding into smaller and smaller particles along with all of the other plastic pollution, so yay.
I can’t point to any specific sources on this, it’s from reading various articles over two decades, I’m definitely not an authority.
That said, a deteriorating Teflon coating can be a hazard
This is my concern. I don’t know if I’m just being too rough with my cookware, but in my experience, non-stick coating (Teflon included) doesn’t tend to last longer than a few months before deteriorating. Which then requires more substantial cleaning to remove stuck-on food, which further damages the coating, and so on and so forth.
Find it’s better to just avoid the stuff entirely, but there’s a lot of cookware that you can’t easily get in a non-non-stick format. Specifically muffin tins and air fryers. I’ll stop there before this turns into a rant…!
Monsanto gets do much worse than polluting. They tried (succeeded? Not sure) in hooking farmers to only buying their seeds through genetic modification to grow anything. I remember huge protests, then we all sort of moved on.
Ah the old terminator seeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology
In a similar vein:
There’s at least a chance that PepsiCo’s patented potatoes had gotten into the worldwide supply on accident and it really was no fault of these farmers for growing patented food.
Also similarly, varieties of apples are also patented.
Terminator seeds are not GMO, they are regular hybrid seeds. If you’ve ever grown anything from a seed, you’d know the difference between hybrids and heirlooms.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1142333/
The US chemical giant DuPont learned its lesson of Bhopal in a different way. The company attempted for a decade to export a nylon plant from Richmond, VA to Goa, India. In its early negotiations with the Indian government, DuPont had sought and won a remarkable clause in its investment agreement that absolved it from all liabilities in case of an accident.
The Bhopal disaster was Union Carbide and then Dow Chemicals baby, but as this paper points out, companies like DuPont learned some particularly evil things from it.
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.
This sounds like a plot point from the OA.
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?
Lmao, that name though. “Our virtue is a con.”
Adobe.
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.
