There are a number of industries which, owing to business practices and perception in the media, are commonly associated as being evil.
These include nuclear power, big pharma, and healthcare, at least in the United States, while some retail services such as Amazon are notorious for the poor working conditions in their factories.
However, are any industries or businesses wholly without sin?
We might find ourselves surprised what goes on behind closed doors of industries we've come to trust as ethical and without fault.
"What industry is a lot shadier than it seems?"
They Make Them An Offer They Can't Refuse.
"My dad knows a story from someone who works for a nationwide grocery chain, they have to deal with an Italian mafia to import balsamic vinegar."- tokyokillswhale
Aroused Grocery Store GIF by TravisGiphyLife On The Seas...
"The maritime industry. "
"Most of the big companies do things by the book and treat crews well because they’re afraid of lawsuits and unions, but many smaller 'mom and pop' companies break laws and violate safety regulations with reckless abandon because they’re not as visible and can 'stay under the radar' so to speak."
"It’s very common for a small company to ask a captain/crew to do something illegal and dangerous in order to increase profit, and for the captain/crew to comply out of fear of losing their jobs."
"And that’s just the US maritime industry."
"Sailors from poorer nations who work on ships are often fed little more than rice and cheap ramen for months at a time and paid pennies for their backbreaking work."
"I love running tugs for a living, but the industry as a whole is rife with shady business."- AbleTourist6
So Many Fish In The Sea
"A lot of hobby fish importing is pretty shady."
"You have farms of certain types of fish like bettas in some areas of the world that are run with the fish in horrible conditions."
"Which is why a lot of the ones you get in a major chain store are sick before you even bring them home."
'Outside of boutique fish farming, the way some wild fish are caught is just horrible."
"The trappers will lightly poison the water supply to knock out the fish, then scoop them out of the water without a care for that area's ecosystem."
"This has led to depletion of some natural species to the point they are now endangered."
"Lastly, boutique fish sellers/major chains do not give half a rat's a** what happens to the fish in the end."
"This means that people who buy fish like plecos, bettas, goldfish, etc. end up getting sick of them and dumping them in local waterways to supposedly get rid of the problem."
'So in some areas, these fish have completely destroyed the local water ecology because, like other invasive land species, they were never meant to be there."
"One of the worst offenders is the lionfish in Florida."
"It's venomous and has no natural predators so its population has exploded out of control."
"The same is true of plecos and goldfish.
"Basically releasing fish into the wild is a terrible idea."
"Releasing any animal into the wild can have disastrous consequences, but fish are being released into a very limited ecosystem and outside of a few diseases, if they can adapt to the water and have no predators they will survive and breed incredibly quickly."
"I love my fish, I love the hobby, and there's a lot of value to it as global warming may make things like reef tanks a valuable source of coral in the future."
"But there's also a lot of bad to it."- beepborpimajorp
Cat Thank GIFGiphyOne Star...
"Rating services like Yelp."
" Refuse to advertise and your good reviews magically get rearranged."
"Hey, look if you want to do that and be transparent, I get it."
"But most every business owner knows how scummy this is and most clients just have no idea."
"I have a business that isn't something that would usually be looked for on Yelp.'
"They called and I just froze.'
"Luckily I do long term rentals and was sold out."
"Explained I wouldn't have an opening for months, they seemed to leave me alone."
"Yet they have my business on the front page of Google search, under the wrong category.'- chinmakes5
Just Try A Balanced Diet!
"Dietary supplements."
"It's gotten better, but there's still a lot of half-truths and whole lies."
"Not all that long ago it was seriously like the wild wild west."- LaquandaSchutt
Pills GIFGiphyTrust No One!
"All industries are shadier than they seem."
"I used to work for a flute manufacturer and it was shady as hell."- pajmahal
Take a Closer Look...
"Eyeglasses."
"You have no idea the snow job they put most people through when it comes to buying them."
"It's far, far worse than trying to buy a new car from a dealership."
"Wholesale frames are about $5-20, wholesale lens blanks are another $10."
"Any kind of dip coating, UV, tinting, etc, is negligible cost and effort to apply, literally pennies."
"To top it off, they don't even do a whole lot in house, but send it to 'labs' which are basically sweatshops that can take up to 2-3 weeks when labor time is literally under 5 minutes."
"Instead of training real opticians and technicians, they're just glorified sales staff now."
"Most of the time they don't even bother with proper measurement for pd, frame width, or arm fitting."
"Was an optician in the early 90's."
"I'm horrified at what the business has become."- PolecatEZ
Truck Stop (the Madness)
"Trucking."
"The margins are razor thin and so everyone is trying to nickle and dime each other constantly."
"The drivers lie to their dispatchers, the dispatchers lie to the brokers, the brokers lie to the clients."
"All of this for like $50-100 sometimes."
LaquandaSchutt·
"I worked in trucking and the head HR lady for our distribution center was skimming payroll, shorting the checks of the lowest people on the totem pole, then getting cash infusions to petty cash from corporate to return part of the theft as an "emergency tide over" until the employee's next check, then claiming the rest of the theft as an overage on the next payroll report (I am probably missing a step in her chain but I am not an accountant)."
"It was a scam she managed to work for a couple of years due to a lack of oversight during nationwide management shifts. When she finally got caught, rather than take the bad publicity, the company just let her leave. The last I heard she was working in the same position in an adjacent industry, but still involving transportation. C'est la vie."
silversatire
Green Gold
"Avocado farms. Most of the farms in Central America are taken over by the cartel because of how much money is in selling avocados."
Theseapug
Puppy Mills
Pet industry. Basement puppy mills and dogs that are so inbred they can hardly breathe. There are plenty of ethical breeders out there (and some unlicensed breeders are ethical even if in a legal grey zone) but the conditions of some of the so-called puppy mills can be really bad. Sometimes when breeds are mixed and the pup gets the recessive genes the breeders weren’t looking for.. they straight up euthanize it because they know it won’t sell. Not to mention how many “purebreds” are actually not pure at all... and sold as is. Shady."
Agent-Tiberius
CBD
"CBD, lot of predatory companies making subpar products with questionable raw materials and then marking it way the fu*k up and selling it as a miracle cure to vulnerable and ill-educated consumers. Usually have a high power legal team on deck, but pay their workers sh*t and no benefits."
kindredfold
Take You To The Mattresses
"Worked in the mattress industry for a bit at a startup. Basically 90% bullsh*t. And the worst part? We had a real doctor serve an advisory role for our products. He debunked a lot of nonsense claims about mattresses like “your pillow is 50% of your spinal support” that the salespeople use to sell you accessories. The salespeople would argue with him, like they knew better. Kool-Aid is strong there."
"Some of my favorites I learned are: these hip direct-to-door in a box foam bed companies like Tuft and Needle use the same material, from the same manufacturer. There’s hundreds of them, just put them in different boxes and sell at wildly different prices."
“Side sleeper” “back sleeper” and “stomach sleeper” is baloney. You toss and turn at night on purpose, to help prevent blood clots."
"No mattress will keep you from “tossing and turning” for the reason above. It’s a natural thing you’re supposed to do."
"More layers DOESNT mean better mattress. A lot of companies add in cheap materials like upholstery foam to just claim there’s more layers. Maybe one layer of nice springs then just 10 layers of various types of cheap foam to get the layers higher."
"One that actually IS true is heat. If you frequently are hot at night, foam mattress is not good for you. It’s an insulator and will trap your heat on your body. In general, air and spring are better beds because of heat. Your body needs to dump temperature at night to get into a full, deep sleep. If it’s too hot, you won’t sleep well."
KourteousKrome·
All That Gitters
"Glitter."
"A manager of one of the biggest glitter manufacturers, Glitterx, said in a 2018 interview that most of the glitter they make goes to one buyer for a single industrial use. When asked who the buyer was and why they need so much glitter, she said “Oh, I definitely can’t disclose that.” When asked why, she said “Because they don’t want anybody to know it’s glitter.”
"Ever since this interview people have been trying to guess what company or industry secretly uses most of the world’s glitter and why they want to keep that use under wraps."
stebbi01
It's harder to avoid putting money in an industry to which we have numerous moral objectinons than we would like to admit.
But who knows if our favorite stores, which we frequent with regularity, are any better?
Maybe ignorance is bliss?
Or maybe we need to raise stronger objections....
Food is not one size fits all. Just because you're a fan of one kind of food, it doesn't mean you'll like anything under that category.
I adore vegetables, but I shudder just thinking about eggplant.
Meat is the same way. Just because you eat meat doesn't mean there aren't certain kinds of meat you refuse to consume. Redditors shared what kinds of meat they don't eat, but their reasons are not based on taste preference -- it's about the ethics of eating a certain kind of meat.
Curious about what those types of meat may be, Redditor Candid_Reading_7267asked:
"Meat eaters: what type of meat, if any, is off your menu for ethical reasons?"
Too Sweet To Eat
"I used to raise calves and I’ve learned that if you socialize a cow they are the sweetest things. I once had a cow lay down next to me in the grass and put her head on my lap. I don’t eat beef now."
– TheShining02
He's A Survivor
"I don't eat pork or any pig meat. I used to work on a farm where I raised pigs. Five adults and something like 40 piglets. I fell in love with them. I used to just go on my off hours and hang out in the piglet pen They would just leap all over me and give me kisses They're massive smart. I can't eat them now anymore or less than I don't eat dogs. They're untouchable."
"There was a runt piglet, I nicknamed him Slayer because he probably shouldn't have survived, but he did. He was hardcore, so I had to give him a hardcore name. He was a runt named Slayer. It perfectly fits him."
– trebuchetfight
It Needs To Be Painless
"Any that comes from an endangered animal (e.g. tiger meat) or any that have abhorrent extraction practices (e.g. shark fin)."
"I know that the other types of meat I consume do not grow on trees, that something had to die for it to be made available, but there is a difference between killing an animal with a quick pressure gun and cutting off their fin and throwing them back into the sea to die slowly and painfully."
– Pink-Camellias
Full Stop
"Anything that is cooked alive"
– Sweetcherry66
The Sea Creatures We Love
"Turtle meat because I like turtles"
– Godmyass
"Agreed. And octopus because they’re just so cool and intelligent. They already live such short lives."
– NahWeGotCreampies
Shocking
"I won't support anything that is obscenely wasteful."
"When I was 14 and went fishing with my Dad I caught a Shovelnose Shark. Absolutely gorgeous creature it was almost as big as I was."
"We took it home and I honestly thought it would feed all 8 of us (it was a holiday so it was my family and my Uncle's family)."
"Anyway, dinner gets served: everyone else had Chicken, and I was served what I could only describe as cooked fish that looked like the size of maybe 2 or 3 big sausages."
"It turns out that only the tail meat is actually edible."
"I was M O R T I F I E D."
"Killed a giant animal only to basically eat 2 hot dogs worth of actual meat."
"Never went fishing with my Dad again because it turned out he knew that when I caught it. If I had have known I would have thrown it back."
– rayjaymor85
What's In A Name?
"Any animal with a name that I know."
"We raise chickens. Thought we'd wind up eating them after they stopped laying eggs, but my kids named the flock and I couldn't bring myself to do it."
– Trail__Junkie
The Big Reveals
"Veal. I remember being a kid and my mom made us breaded veal and said it was chicken and when we finished announced “you just ate baby cow!” I cried so much lol."
– littleleg0s
"My stepdad's grandparents owned a farm. They let him name a cow after himself when he was about six. One night they were having burgers for dinner and his grandpa just said "Guess what? We're eating Johnny for dinner!""
"I never will understand why the hell the idea to feed him the cow sounded like a good idea to him but especially why they decided to tell him they'd slaughtered and prepared it mid-bite."
– psy-ducks
We Are Family
"Apes."
– Mooseboy24
"Especially chimps, they're our closest relatives in the animal kingdom and beautiful, fascinating animals. And now they're an endangered species partly because they're being hunted for bushmeat."
– NotFeziboy
–
Just A Baby
"As a dairy farmer the only meat i will not eat is veal. And I have seen on here a lot of misinformation about the practices of animal farming I would like to clear up a few from the perspective of a dairy farmer. Cows who are 5 plus years old don't usually get slaughtered I personally have 50 plus cows over the age of ten which I am very proud off."
"On my farm or in the uk generally none of my calves get sent to veal production all of the beef calves get slaughtered for meat between 24 and 36 months and each beef bullock has spent all summers out on grass."
"Cows and calves do get separated when they are born this is for the benefit of the cow and us as we get the milk and the cow gets fully milked out and is comfortable. The calves get cows milk for 2 months after they are born and 1 months further on replacer."
"Sorry to ramble there is just a lot of misinformation on the subject."
– Lamies_
–
Don't Want To Be Part Of The Problem
"It would have to be on the endangered species list. I would try anything else at least once to see how it taste."
– Nogardknight
Made To Eat
"Any mammal that was not specifically bred on a farm to be served as meat for humans - off limits. Especially mammals from the ocean and sharks, not cool to eat."
"Pork, beef, mutton, chicken and fish. Why do you want to kill anything else for food?"
– Great-Cantaloupe542
Can't Do It Anymore
"Lamb because of their intelligence and personality level. We bottle fed a lamb and had it in the house. This made me quit red meat also. I don't buy chicken but will eat leftovers if the kids don't. Still eat fish and egg. I've contemplated bow hunting deer once in a while still."
– EmbarrassedLemon33
Not Going To Get Sick
"Bear meat. Heard it contains tons of parasites."
– Xtoxy
Eco-Friendly
"I don't eat cow meat if there's any other alternative. It's not the best thing for the environment. I'm not committed enough to be a vegetarian, but I try to stick to more sustainable options."
– pipersweeney
Completely Awful
"Shrimp, crab, lobster. They get boiled alive. Animal cruelty at its finest."
"(I'm also Jewish which forbids eating these but I don't really follow the religion, I don't eat pork only because it seems disgusting, I don't fear any gods so I guess shrimp crab and lobster count as ethical)"
– TheGoodThingsGL
My Old Pet
"I won’t eat rabbit because I love bunnies and had a pet rabbit at one point. I want another someday."
– Hexactinellida
Man's Best Friend
"Dogs and cats probably any common pet"
– Dudeman1245
"Can't believe it took this long for someone to say dog"
– ikindalold
I'm a big meat eater, but after all that...I may have to reconsider my diet.
Laws are not always ethical, are they?
While most are implemented to keep the peace and prevent people from stealing from one another, there are many which feel wrong. Whether it's who they're hurting or what they're preventing, there's something morally incoherent about their alignment.
Some of us just want to play classic video games, okay?
Reddit user bleachspot wanted to know:
"What is something that is illegal but isn't wrong ethically?"
You have to pay for everything.
That's the truth of the world, right?
There's no other way to get around this.
Oh yeah. The internet.
Paying For Science Is Tough, Apparently
"Downloading scientific papers from Sci-hub."
Tropical_Geek1
"Paying to access scientific knowledge in general"
swan_tanya
"In order to explain science publishing, I always describe it as a system so awful, their version of The Pirate Bay won industry awards."
"I always wonder a little about people who like to pipe up with "just write to the authors; they're usually happy to shrae their work for free!" like we're living 40+ years ago. Maybe I'm denying the authors their share of warm fuzzies, but I'm not gonna bother writing the authors. I can download the paper and be onto the methodology section before I could even finish phrasing my email: "Hi there, long time listener first time caller. Love your work. If you don't mind, could you spare a few minutes to email me a copy? I need it for an argument on reddit. Thanks in advance."
Suspicious-Muscle-96
Ever Try To Buy A Game From More Than A Few Years Ago?
"Downloading Roms of old games. We all know you don't own any of those games, but if companies aren't willing to rerelease them then it should be good to download roms online."
SuccessDisastrous625
"Yep, my general rules of thumb are;"
"If I already owned the game at some point in the past, I'm not going to feel guilty about emulating it however many years later unless it's still readily available."
"My other is if the product is not supported in any modern way, with no easy way to obtain it legitimately then I'm not gonna feel bad either."
"If it's readily available/I've never owned it, I pay."
Homo-Homie
Just One Word Missing And You've Failed The Class
"Downloading college ebooks instead of spending $400 dollars on the latest version which all they did was change the spelling of a few words, and called v87.12458281648391846 of the book, and require it for your college class, even though they only use a single paragraph from chapter 13 which is a quote from a $5 book they offer in most bookstores. And then fail you from the class if you have v87.12458281648391845 instead."
Knightraiderdewd
If laws are supposed to be protecting people, then how do you explain these?
An Annoying Way To Make Money
"Paying for someone else’s parking meter"
PunMatster
"In Keene new Hampshire there was a group called the "robinhooders of keene". They would follow around the meter maid and put quarters in the meters so they couldn't write tickets. Most of the revenue comes from the tickets, not the meters. The city tried to sue but they were unsuccessful. Some unknown benefactor paid the robinhooders to do it. It was part of the libertarian "free state project"
FightForDemocracyNow
You Can't Just Live Anywhere
"Living off the grid without a permit"
RevDLB
"It's hilarious in most places in the USA theres a rule where you cannot camp on YOUR OWN LAND for more than 2 weeks at a time."
"Nobody is going to give a f-ck if you do but still, the rule is there."
"You need a long term camping permit to do so."
"Literally you have to pay to live anywhere in this dumb country haha"
ScrotusMahotus
You Seriously Can't Live Anywhere
Loitering in a park. I've always wondered why this is illegal in some places. The point of a park is to loiter
[usernamedeleted]
"Because homelessness."
thefreakyorange
"It's not illegal to not have a home, but you better believe there are dozens of laws that are directed at, or primarily affect the homeless."
Creeps_On_The_Earth
Sometimes it feels like laws are protecting the wrong people, isn't it?
No Charity
"taking food from dumpsters"
thingstooverthink
"My sister used to work at a Starbucks kiosk in a grocery store. At the end of the day she was supposed to throw away the pastries that were in single use plastic wrappers and she’d write them off as disposed of and such but she’d take them home cause we were struggling financially and was trying to provide a little extra help to her family. It was her first job and was still a teen and naive to the trouble she could get into."
"One day they accused her of stealing and showed the tapes of her taking them home and ended up escorting her out with security and put her on probation and just went the full 9 yards over it. She came home traumatized and sobbing. Corporate is the most inhumane system we’ve ever made yet it’s the one with the most power over us. It’s despicable."
Imagimoor1
You Can't Grow Your Own Wheat?
"Using your own wheat grown on your own fields to feed your family bread when Congress says you can't because the wheat was grown on an acre of your land Congress designated as not for wheat."
"Google Wickard v Filburn for those of you saying this is a made-up scenario. The Supreme court decided that while this farmer was not influential on the economy alone, if many farmers did the same as him in the aggregate, they would cause harm to interstate commerce, which placed his actions under Congressional regulatory authority."
"If you are into US constitutional law at all, this is a very important case to know. Even as conservatives introduced their own spin on commerce later, the foundation and most important bits of Wickard are still there and affect you every single day."
captchasaysimhuman
In Case You Were Wondering...
"You can not own more then 75 salamanders in the state of Illinois, how tf am I gonna start salamander trafficking now. F-ck Illinois"
HalfEasy
Life is complicated enough without worrying about what's right or wrong.
Just don't hurt anybody.
Simple enough credo to follow.
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Businesses have been known to cut corners and abuse their employees to make a buck. It's a trick as old as the institution of employment itself.
But it does come back to bite them... eventually. Every once in a while a business owner feels the effect of the pain they have caused on other people.
Either way, we now talk to each other about these exploitive and abusive practices.
Redditor PMForDickGraysonPics asked:
What are some of the worst business practices you've seen?
Here were some of those answers.
Not The Animals
A veterinarian I once worked for tried to make me reuse bloody IV tubing between patients, "just rinse it out" he told me. He charged the same amount for a pain injection for a 5 lb pet and a 150lb pet, he over-worked and underpaid his employees, he was rude to his clients, and tried to make staff carry out tasks they were not qualified/educated to do. He would cut corners in any possible way.
Several of us reported him to the board.
Yeah Just Do It Fam
Hostility towards raises. Rewarding your existing employees is almost always cheaper than hiring new. Ive had a manager that scoffed at a single 3% raise for someone who had no raise for 5 years. Good luck hiring a new person with that experience and for less money. There's a reason why job hopping gets you more money, and it's not because hiring new is cheaper.
This Is Called Entrapment
Any company/service that allows you to sign up using the internet with minimal verification but requires you to either produce ID, bills, proof of address, or show up in person to cancel that service.
if i can set it up via the internet i should be able to cancel using the internet too.
Buzz Buzz Buzz
I used to serve at a restaurant where we wore pagers that buzzed us when a table's food was ready. Good idea right? Well the owners had the policy that you had to immediately go pick up the food no matter what, and that included if you were in the middle of taking another table's order. They said that people "understand" and are cool with it. Of course they weren't though. Every time I stopped taking a table's order and went and got the food, they were totally pissed off. I could not believe the owners did not understand why literally no other restaurant on the planet does it that way.
Stealing!
I use the term "business" loosely, but I once did graduate research with a professor who was in the process of trying to get a major auto manufacturer to invest in our lab. They liked us, but wanted an example of some of our work. So rather than directing them to some publications of ours, my professor gave them a zip file containing all of our recent unpublished research, including the basis for a patent application.
My professor was shocked when they just kept it.
She Done Closed
I worked at a restaurant that wouldn't let people get a refund on their food even though there was a cockroach in it. Instead they offered a 10% discount on the food as per their "policy". Needless to say this restaurant no longer exists.
Forcing You To Quit
Trying to get employees to quit. My managers at fast food didn't want to keep long term employees due to having to pay them more and firing them means unemployment costs. Us quitting means no unemployment and not having to give raises.
Fraud....
So this store put a massive discount on weighted blankets. They were originally selling for $150, but were now being offered for $39.99.
The catch? You'd need to sign up for free as a VIP member online. Urm ok no harm done.
So i signed up and bought the blanket. And so did thousands of other people.
The store cancelled our orders and refunded our money, claiming that they weren't able to fulfil our orders. And now they had a couple thousand more new names on their mailing list.
And sure enough marketing emails came pouring through. I unsubscribed once but still had emails coming in.
THE POOR DOGGOS
I heard this one from a friend: She worked at a dog kennelling business that would tour prospective clients through the front of the building and show off how each dog would get its own indoor/outdoor run area and specialized attention, etc. Then when Thanksgiving and Christmas came and they got more bookings then they could accommodate, they set up cages and stacked kennels in a back room and people were paying big dollars thinking that their dogs were in a nice roomy pen while the business crammed as many dogs as they could into these basic cages. It was shameful.
A Rock And A Hard Place
I worked for a big car rental company in the returns department. They would push us to find and charge customers for any new damage on their cars by awarding bonuses on top of our monthly salary.
We were given mirrors to look for scratches under the cars where costumers would normally not have checked before they rented the car, often leading to heated arguments over if it really was their fault or not. The company did not care either way and made us charge their insurance deposit if they refused to pay. The daily verbal abuse and stress from being sandwiched between my managers and angry customers has definitely left a mark on my mental health and I will probably never work in the traveling industry again.
While many of the things described aren't illegal, they're definitely unethical.
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In a time where money talks more than anything else, the consumer's dollar holds a lot of power.
Withholding that dollar from unethical brands makes a big statement, not just about the brand, but about the buyer. What capitalistic nonsense do they refuse to engage in?
And also, if they continue spending their money there, such as Chik-Fil-A, what kind of atrocities are they committed to engaging in?
u/AngryTrooper09 asked:
People of Reddit, what unethical brands to you refuse to buy from?
Here were some of those answers.
US Healthcare Is A Joke
If I could ditch the over priced insulin, I would in a heart beat but you know, I'd like to live.
Here in Canada, the vial is $40 CAN. In the US, the same vial by the same company is $550 CAN.
So freaking unethical overpricing life sustaining medication.
Stealing Intellectual Property
Sinful Colors nail polish. 10+ years back my sister told me about how they took her friends nail art pictures and used them for marketing purposes. She asked them to either give her credit or take them down and they refused.
Petty Jealousy
Backcountry.com and it's affiliated websites. They hired a bunch of lawyers to sue small businesses using the name 'backcountry' anywhere in it's name or tag line. Many of the companies were much older than backcountry.com. They have since sent out a 'sorry we were caught' letter, but there's too many other outdoor companies that are run ethically, I can't justify buying from backcountry.
She Just Cares About Your Money
Random one, but Kylie Jenner.
She exploited young fans by saying she didnt have fillers and looks like she has big lips from wearing lipstick and liner. Then sold Kylie lip kits to take advantage of self conscious girls wanting bigger lips, and seriously thinking that she hadn't used filler.
She stole designs from smaller brands and used them for her own clothing, pretending her company made the designs.
Then her skincare is awful. Overpriced stuff that barely works, and the scrub will cause serious damage to your skin.
Another which some have commented on. She isn't paying her workers in Bangladesh. She is taking advantage of desperate people in order to save money...when she is close to being a billionaire.
Overall she just exploits her fans for money. Nothing she does is actually as good as it is made out to be.
Whoopsies
Lenovo.
It seems every year they are either putting malicious code or conveniently overlooked security backdoors into their hardware. And when called out on it, their response is "Was that wrong? Should we not have done that?"
Rurality Speaks Volumes
Walmart. I work for a small transport company so Ive seen how they bully small companies with fines for like, everything if you don't do things their way. Plus they also have a lot of internal stories about terrible employee treatment
Bentonville Arkansas has a bunch of little communities around it. Walmart decided one day to "test out" some small grocery stores in these communities, smaller than neighborhood markets. Ran them at a loss, forcing all the grocers shut down. Then went "We're not making money at these" shut down the grocery stores, forcing people to come back into the main town.
Last time I was in the region, I saw they were putting up walmart gas stations as well as the ones at each of the stores. All conveniently 5-10 cents cheaper than non Walmart gas stations.
I get "don't shop there" but when people are trying to save money, they're obviously going to go to the cheaper place. And no one can compete with the company that runs things at a loss until all the competition is gone.
Fast Fashion, Fast Pass
I don't buy from fast fashion brands. H&M, Zara , etc. They aren't unethical, but they are terrible for the environment. One of the most wasteful industries. I love fashion, don't get me wrong. I tend to lean towards a more vintage vibe anyway and thrift shop a lot. But when it comes to sneakers I'll spend a little more on some better brand. Over a wasteful brand.
No Free Market
If you read this thread you will realize that nearly everything you buy comes with serious ethical issues. It is nearly impossible to avoid consuming things that cause harm. What we need more than you individually boycotting a company you just discovered has unethical practices is for you to join a political movement to hold the wealthy and the powerful accountable and to regulate business practices. There are simply too many people who are either oblivious or refuse to be inconvenienced that render little boycotts here and they're ultimately ineffective. The market does NOT regulate itself effectively. This is a myth and a lie.
Running Through The Excuses
Honestly, Mcdonalds.
After running that poor old lady through the mud for literally serving coffee that was dangerously hot and then refusing to pay her bills over their coffee being so hot that it gave her third degree burns and nearly killed her after putting her in shock.... All she wanted was her medical bills paid for. She only sued because they kept refusing, despite the courts saying that 190 degree coffee was too dangerous to serve in the end.
They were in the wrong, and painted her lawsuit as frivolous and that she was the idiot. Coffee is hot, but it shouldn't be served at 190 degrees.... Plus the way they treat the franchisees and employees. Food ain't good enough for me to want to give them any money.
They Ruined Star Wars
EA Games.
It used to be that you either bought a game OR had micro transactions in a free game. EA changed this so you had to BUY the game and then pay for micro transactions to unlock the good part of the game.
Google "most down voted reddit post" and it's EA customer service trying to justify their decision to put micro transactions into Battlefront.
If I see a game with EA on the cover I absolutely 100% will not buy it.
Not The Chocolate!
Nestlé and its brands, Mars, Hershey, and Folgers. More generally I don't buy any chocolate, coffee, or clothing that uses exploitative labor, as far as is in my power. Lots of child slave labor in those industries.
More Chocolate Stealing?
Hostess. They "borrowed" from their employees pensions, and then filed bankruptcy. Only to come back, debt free and start making Twinkees again. Also, all big business who took money from the payroll protection program intended for small businesses.
The Biggest News Story Of 2017
United Airlines. They violently dragged away a medical professional who needed to go back to work just for more room for some employees. After the incident, the ceo sent an email to employees saying he was 'belligerent' and 'distruptive'. They also killed a puppy by putting it in the overhead compartment where there's no ventilation.
Let's Normalize Necessity, Not Money
Bottled water.
Unnecessary plastic pollution? ✔️
Less regulated than tap water? ✔️
Stealing water resources from developing countries? ✔️
Capitalizing on what should be a basic human right? ✔️
Not-So-Funimation
Most anime studios. They pay their employees low wages and work them to the bone, paying by the page completed rather than the hour. Made me rethink my stance as an anime fan. The only ones with any sort of ethics are Kyoto Animation, paying their workers a livable wage. They'll be the only ones I'll buy from until things change.
The Food Is Poison!
Chipotle and Panera. Hate their marketing campaigns, both claim to be "healthy" and "clean" but truly aren't. And those words are akin to "natural" when discussing food and nutrition - too broad a description and utterly meaningless. So many better Mexican food joints and local sandwich places I'd much rather support.