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?
201 comments
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Chick-fill-A and Hobby Lobby are part of the same asshole Christian subspecies, do crazy shit like stealing/buying stolen artifacts, and being super anti-gay and anti-trans.
Oh and Chick-fil-A's did is trash. I tried it before I learned the company sucked, not long after it first moved into Chicagoland. Not only is the chicken bland AF - including the "spicy" chicken - but they managed to somehow make waffle fries taste bleh. How the hell do you even fuck up waffle fries? I can't understand how these assholes stay in business in the area with chicken that's worse than what I can get at Burger King, much less any of a million small local places and chains.
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Chick-fil-A is actually pretty good near me. I get them once a month or once every other month or so.
In terms of fast food, I'd definitely say there's in the top 20% in terms of food quality.
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Mormons, Inc.”
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Granicus
Unknown to most, but they maintain a large number of local, state, and all the way up to Federal US public websites. They have quickly relocated their entire US based team outside of sales to underdeveloped countries over the last year for a very specific reason... And also unbeknownst to most of their clients.
Last year they brought in MS and Amazon CEO brains that have been turning things upside down for a quick flip ever since. These type of people need to BURN.
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Pharmaceutical company Bayer. Sold HIV infected blood to poorer countries because they didn’t want to lose the investment they had in the blood.
Basically the blood was tested, found out it was HIV contaminated, went to a part of the world where they didn’t test as well. Messed with the results of the tests, and infected thousands of people with it, and eventually AIDS. All because the financial loss they would have taken from destroying the blood was considered too much.
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Palantir is pretty core to the Surveillance Society in several supposedly Democratic countries. More in general just about all companies in that space such as the NSO Group makers of the Pegasus software for remote hacking of smartphones are invariably unethical
Similarly the whole business of Investment Banking is pretty unethical, and that definitely includes most Hedge Funds, the latter never being household names.
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I think the question already contains a sort of ideological trap: it assumes that a specific company can be uniquely evil, as if morality were some trait that varies between company to company.
I'm sure everyone's heard this before:
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
It's not just a slogan. It gives us insight into the very structure of capitalism. That doesn't mean every individual act is equally bad, but the system demands a sort of baseline complicity.
CEOs and executives are legally required to maximize shareholder profits. Not just encouraged— legally obligated. So when Coca-Cola, for example, hires paramilitary death squads to kill labor leaders in Colombia, it's not because it is uniquely monstrous. Replace Coca-Cola with Pepsi, or Nestle, or Amazon, or Raytheon.. whatever. The logic of the system would produce the same result. If I gave the same chess position to 30 different Grandmasters.. if there is a best move they will all see it and choose that best move.
Think of an ant colony. An ant colony doesn't decide to be cruel; it expands, consumes, protects its territory, destroys threats. Is it evil when some colony wipes out another for resources? A colony committing what we could term ant genocide? No it's not. The colony is simply acting in its nature. Much like a slime mold would expand in a radius looking for food in a petri dish.
Large corporations are like ant colonies. Complex emergent behavior resulting from a large number of individual units acting by a set of rules. The intelligence or perspective of the individual does not actually matter for the organism as a whole. As long as the individual units follow a set of rules it creates a sort of "hive-mind" pseudo-intelligence that acts in its own interests and has an almost Darwinist natural selection process.
So this is all to say that I reject the question. I don't believe in uniquely evil companies. The horror is precisely that they're all, in a sense, innocent. They act not out of hatred or sadism or cruelty, but because the system itself has carved out the pathways where the ball inevitably rolls down the hill following the path of least resistance.
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Prenda law. A legal outfit that would seed porn and then sue downloaders for copyright violations. The idea being that people would settle to avoid being publicly humiliated by their porn viewing habits.
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HSBC - how many times can a bank be caught laundering dirty money and still exist?
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All restaurants
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Generally the larger the company the more evil it is as a general rule, so a lesser known evil company would be unlikely. That's why I'm supportive of a strong democratic federal government, the natural predator of companies.
There is a US company that I understand the importance of so I won't share the details but very few know anything about them. I'll just say they make products used for arts and crafts, celebrations, and also Nuclear Weapons.
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I worked for an investment firm that had about 75 employees, but managed $35 billion in assets. There are a lot of those. Their investments tended to be a lot of the companies ruining the world, ranging from the privatized ambulance companies to the privatized hospice care companies to the emerging-market banks, etc...etc... And that's just one "small" investment firm.
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Bank of New York Melon
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College Board. Maker of the SAT
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Fuck College Board with a rake. Seriously awful when college is already so expensive.
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GNC. The vitamin stores. They knowingly sell expired merchandise and withhold commissions from their employees.
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Red Bull, they are nazis and spread fake news about conspiracy theories on their own TV network in Austria. Source
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Knauf. They produce drywall boards, among other building materials. You probably dwell a home where these products are built in. Excerpt from linked Wikipedia article:
In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Yale University published a list of companies that chose to remain active in Russia. According to this report, over 600 companies have withdrawn from Russia — but some remain. Knauf is still operating across 14 sites in Russia but has claimed to have suspended new investments.[5].
In November 2023 Ukraine listed Knauf as an International Sponsor of War for promoting mobilisation in Russia by sending its employees to the war against Ukraine.[6].
According to German public-service broadcaster ARD, Knauf has been active in collaborating with the Russian military in its construction efforts in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.[7][8]Another source (German), 2024 states, that due to investigation of a news outlet, they allegedly withdrew their actions.
Withdrawal in response to ARD investigation?
Only recently, the plaster company from Lower Franconia hit the headlines because of its activities in Russia: Research by the ARD magazine “Monitor” suggested that Knauf had violated EU sanctions against Russia. Whether the withdrawal from Russia is connected to the allegations made was neither confirmed nor denied by the company to BR24 today and a press spokeswoman did not wish to comment on the matter in response to a written request.They probably wanted to have a foot in the door when it comes to rebuilding, when the war will be over finally.
Another, probably more known company is Claas, a manufacturer of farming equipment like combine harvesters and such. Another source (German), 2023 claims
The company condemns Russia's attack on Ukraine, said Mohr. Nevertheless, Claas cannot and does not want to withdraw from one of the world's most important agricultural regions. “Both countries are enormously important for feeding the world's population. That's why farming must continue there,” Mohr told the SZ newspaper, adding that harvesting machines were essential for this.
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By far all of the US MIC companies.
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KPMG, Deloitte and Mc Kinsey, for reasons that include at times being both financial auditor and bookkeeping at the same time, and consultancy meaning reducing headcount no matter the cost.
I don't really know all that much about it honestly but all I've heard of them, is that they get the smartest people to do the worst thing that they can get away with.
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Mc Kinsey are the guys who invented and popularised the idea of executive bonuses for short term company performance and the idea of layoffs to temporarily make those companies look like they're doing better. They've also consulted for all of the most evil companies in this thread while they were doing their most evil shit. They constantly do the most courpt stuff imaginable. Often their advice creates massive problems which they will then sell their services to the people cleaning up their mess.
They've consulted for hostile nations while being paid by the US government to give advice on how to deal with those hostile governments.
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REI. Just another corporation in a "Good Guy" costume. https://www.ourrei.com/2025-rei-board-elections
Union busting, problematic supply chains, pulling PPE from staff. Hell, officially supporting Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Interior because I guess they can't help themselves.
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Oh fuck I just joined their lifetime membership. Is it possible to get that money back, why is every company owned by cunts. I thought REI was a Co OP?
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Don't know about getting money back, but it is something of a coop. My link includes a recommendation to vote "withhold" in the current election, why they recommend the action, and how to do so.
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They're in the middle of a board election, all members get a vote. The union endorses none of the nominees, and suggests you vote for "none of the above".
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Had I known this I wouldn't have bought from REI and joined their membership.
Any thoughts on sports basement?
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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.
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The Sinclair monopoly is an invisible part of why Trump is in office. Local news doesn’t really exist anymore.
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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.
Similar to GEO, there's a long list of companies providing phone service to jails and prisons and their entire existence is based off of extorting the living shit out of vulnerable people to be able to contact their families. The massive Securus hack also showed a high likelihood of these types of companies enabling violations of Attorney-Client privilege.
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Ah yes, the Sinclair “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy” foreshadowing
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I’m now boycotting GEO Group. Henceforth, I will only do IRL heist missions in places where there’s a public prison option.
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Abus. Fundamental evangelical Christians who think women's rights are optional, used forced labor from concentration camps during WW2.
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The company that makes locks?
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Yup, that one. EDIT: also other stuff like bike helmets; they've acquired a range of other companies to broaden their portfolio. But yeah, I would say they're best known for locks.
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Someone needs to create a website called boycotteverything.com or something, and list off every company to boycott because of something heinous they did.
But have a score out of 10; some are worse than others.
And link to sources / fact checks.
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Louis Rossmann just made something like that.
Edit: here is a link https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Main_Page
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It's been done before with things like the Better Business Bureau.
These kinds of initiatives tend to start taking money from businesses so they get a better rating and oftentimes end up as basically an extortion racket. Though sometimes they're just straight up bought out by big corporation and suddenly that corporation and it's business partners get great scores.
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You the same space cowboy of YouTube video game help videos?
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Why am I not surprised.
I guess the website itself would be on it's on list to avoid?
Very meta/ironic.
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I think we'd compile a shorter list if we tried to name wholesome, respectable companies.
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Nah, we have loads of great companies here in the UK.
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Didn’t the UK develop the first large evil corporation?
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Uline comes to mind
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They are the reason I think I severely underestimate that sucess rate of junk mail. They essentially mail me a phone book 5 times a year ro my home and my office and I have ordered exactly zero products from them ever.
It can't be cheap to send all those catalogs, so they must work.
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Worked a contract job for them. Would agree.
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riot games settles for 100 million dollars after sexually harassing its own employees.
Male employees (developers, I think) engaged in drunken "panty raids" where they would crowd into a woman's cubicle and take things from her while she worked.
Riot games chose to pay these women to go away, rather than fix the problem.
They make League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. I will never spend another dollar on their products.
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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."
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They're also 100% Chinese owned. It's the major turnoff for me with their Path of Exile titles.
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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.
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Ones I haven't seen mentioned here yet:
Honeywell is a major millitary contractor.
Meijer, Hanes, Circle K, Jimmy Johns, Thermos, Thortons, Hyvee, Milwaukee, Ryobi, Conair, AAA, Yamaha, Dixie, Roku, New Balance, Sparkle, Saucony, Hoka, Sport Clips, and Lowes - donate almost exclusively to Republicans
Tripplite (bought by Eaton) - Barre Seid donated 1.6 billion to a dark money conservative group.
It's a minefield out there.
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There's a site called "goods unite us" that I'll check before making a big purchase or deciding to make a store a regular stop. It has the average donation history of the company and who they donated to. It sucks that we have a Home Depot in a really convenient location but they're especially egregious donators.
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I use them as well. I wish there was a better agregator though, Walmart passes their check, but treat their employees and suppliers like dirt.
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Conair
All my combs and brushes are made by evil? No wonder I can't feather my hair right. They're only good at keeping it straight.
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Minefield, you say?
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004SPIE.5441...13R/abstract
The Self Healing Minefield (SHM) is comprised of a networked system of mobile anti-tank landmines. When the mines detect a breach, each calculates an appropriate response, and some fire small rockets to "hop" into the breach path, healing the breach. The purpose of the SHM is to expand the capabilities of traditional obstacles and provide an effective anti-tank obstacle that does not require Anti-Personnel (AP) submunitions. The DARPA/ATO sponsored program started in June 2000 and culminated in a full 100-unit demonstration at Fort Leonard Wood, MO in April 2003. That program went from "a concept" to a prototype system demonstration in approximately 21 months and to a full tactically significant demonstration in approximately 33 months.
Ah yes, not self-healing as in able to be disabled after the war is over, but self-healing as automatically "hops" mines into different locations to cover gaps after a single mine explodes.
(To be fair DARPA eventually dumped money into "smart mines" which can be disabled remotely. Still....)
Also I'm reminded of military contractor KBR and Halliburton:
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/jamie-leigh-jones-claims-iraq-rape-employer-held/story?id=13884264
June 21, 2011
A woman who says she was drugged and gang-raped while working for military contractor KBR in Iraq will face down an attorney for KBR in a Texas courtroom today.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 26, was working her fourth day on the job in Baghdad in 2005 when she says she was assaulted by seven U.S. contractors and held captive by two KBR guards in a shipping container. Jones, whose story was featured in an award-winning ABC News "20/20" investigation, is one of a group of women who claim they were harassed or assaulted while working for KBR and former parent company Halliburton in Iraq. She is suing KBR, former parent company Halliburton and KBR firefighter Charles Bortz, who she claims was one of the rapists.
She never got her day in a real court, the contract to force her to take it through arbitration court stood firm.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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. It felt like we were all clinging to each other as we drowned in the rising tide that lifts all boats. None of us had so much as a life raft to rest in. Treading water while we gasped between waves of desperation.
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, 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.
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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.
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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?
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The lower minimum wage for disabled people isn't limited to those on benefits.
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Vale do Rio Verde, two of their (mining waste) dams broke in Brazil, killing thousands and permanently damaging the ecosystem of a entire river
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Oracle is so shitty to its customers there’s multiple law firms that specialize in helping customers sue them.
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And Larry Ellison puts money into his charity looking into how to live forever...
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I agree, but the wording of that is imprecise...
Google reimplemented the same API (which should be legal) but "use" sounds like they called Oracle's implementation of the function
Oracle tried to argue that writing your own virtual machine with the exact same same interface as theirs (even a clean room reimplementatio, or an improved version) was copyright infringement
If Oracle had won, it would likely have killed things like OpenJDK, WINE, Proton, Rosetta, etc. and would have made licensing around OpenGL/Vulkan very confusing (for a few examples)
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Gotta love a company that will sue you if you benchmark their software...
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Out here in Seattle, if you give your two weeks notice as a tech employee to Amazon, and you tell them that you're going to Oracle, they'll just send you home that day. Probably not every team/manager, but it's a thing.
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Samuel Smith Old Brewery is probably the shittiest company in the world. Or more specifically its owner, Humphrey Smith, is a full on twat. And, unlike most companies, this brewery and all associated businesses are unlimited companies, meaning that Humphrey bears full legal responsibility for everything his companies do.
Who's Humphrey Smith? He's an ultra rich Englishman (but no one knows his wealth size as all of his businesses are privately owned unlimited companies, so he doesn't have to file financial reports apart from tax related stuff), he owns a pretty large part of Tadcaster town, hundreds of pubs across UK and he doesn't give a shit about his employees, customers or people living in Tadcaster.
He has extremely strict rules for his pubs, which include no kids, no mobile phones, no TVs, etc. He regularly tours his pubs, kicks out people found using mobile phones and then fires the whole pub staff on the spot. He also blocked construction of a new bridge in Tadcaster when old one fell apart, because fuck locals.
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Any physical therapy/rehab centers under Select Medical. I worked in one of their regional offices processing insurance claims and was exposed to the grossest type of capitalism. Profit through healthcare.
I did my best to make claims take an insanely long time to fully process so the patients weren't hit with their absurd bills right after they just got done with major medical issues. I kept one guy's outrageous bill in limbo the entire 9 months I worked there. He was a local to my area and I knew by the info in the system that he could not afford those bills. I made sure he didn't even see the bills the whole time I was at that job.
I had my ankle reconstructed a couple of years ago and I knew the bills were gonna be crazy. It took 4 months for me to get them and by that time I was already back to work. I like to think that someone was keeping my bills in limbo while I got back on my feet. I paid off the bills a little then lost track of it all and then decided that I'm just not paying medical shit unless I am forced to pay on the spot.
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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 "progressive" 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.
EDIT: Found the article my friend was excited about coming out that didn't seem to get any MSM traction.
Inside ‘Teflon Joe’s’: Why your favorite grocery store is not what you think
How Trader Joe’s remains a beloved brand despite record product recalls, safety violations, worker misconduct complaints, and an environmental record that belies its reputation.
So yeah fuck Trader Joe's.
Oh yeah and the CEO of Protonmail revealed himself to be a Trump supporter.
So fuck Protonmail.
The Brave browser CEO recently went on an hinged rant on that orange site about "lefties," "glowies," and George Soros. He also has a long history of being anti-gay, which is why he lost his job at Firefox, and Brave itself has a shady history with stuff like injecting affiliate codes into URLs.
So fuck Brave.
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That's a shame about Brave, does anyone have an reccomendations for another browser that reduces digital fingerprinting in a similar way?
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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.
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Stopped shopping at Trader Joe's after their anti union shenanigans. Shame because we love their food
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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.
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Let’s keep that surveillance state alive because nothing screams democracy like never trusting anyone!
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Menards. They have a history of dumping waste illegally and then daring the DNR to sue them. One example:
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That's the one store Alec of Technology Connections refers to...
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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.
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If you haven’t seen documentary The Corporation, you must watch it . Amongst other things It explains how there really cannot be any non shitty corporations - so you have to look really hard to find small business that meet your needs.
The concept of “shareholder value” from the Milton Friedman playbook coldly permits any behaviour that increase profits.
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Side note, Milton Friedman wasn't just an evil fuck, he was also in many ways kind of dumb as shit.
His "four ways of spending money" is a prime example.
He claims the fourth way (spending somebody else's money on somebody else) is how the government works, and thus it's wasteful, but what he fails to fucking account for is with how large most corporations are that the fourth way of spending money is effectively how corporations work, too. Some bean counter in accounting and some finance guys and a variety of middle managers are all spending somebody else's money (the company's money) on someone else (the whims of the CEO and the board).
He holds this example up as showing how government spending is always bad and inefficient and how corporate spending isn't, but he's a dumbfuck, they're actually the same.
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I wish I believed in Hell, because the idea of Milton Friedman getting raked over hot coals for eternity is extremely satisfying.
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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.
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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.
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Its worse than you would think...
Not the video I was looking for but it proves the point...
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Monsanto gets so 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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Disney didn't. Their shareholders did.
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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
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They don’t follow morality, they follow money. They go for whichever gets them more money and/or less criticism.
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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.
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Is that you, Luigi?
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Herbalife
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LuLaRoe is up there as well with the life-ruining debt. Then their clothes are so bad that they are literal pollution.
(post from the ceo, who is honestly one of the most evil people in the world)
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Mark all corporations off your list. Corporations don't care about the consumer. Only your money, which supports their shareholders.
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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.
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Any franchise or corporation that makes their religion known. So fuck chick fil a, hobby lobby, and in n out.
Any local small business with political signs or flags, or religious things on full display as well.
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Does In-N-Out do hateful religious stuff like Chick-Fil-A does?
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All I know about is they put things like "John 3:16" on the packaging, but it's tiny and usually in a hard to see place. On the cups it used to be on the inside of the bottom rim. I'm sure they donate to religious organizations.
That said, in-n-out consistently pays ABOVE minimum wage and treat their workers very well. Prices also haven't gone up like other places. So with them, unless I find out they have a specifically evil viewpoint I've been unaware of, then just being religious gets a pass.
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Not that I'm aware of but they do print Bible verses on their stuff and at this point fuck even that.
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Disagree, I wouldn't instantly say that any gay bar is bad because "it states its political views". More like, any business that supports a facist, or is clearly religous.
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I'm not sure I would like to go to any bar or fast food place or anything like that, if they promoted their political views out in the open like that. Even if they perfectly alined with mine. I just don't want to see any of that, i'm there for the service and product.
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Cool. I was talking about religion. Gay people have a right to exist and if a bar is friendly for them, so be it. There are other bars.
Chic Fil A is not trying to merely appeal to those of their own beliefs only. They are willingly taking anyone's money and turning around and using that for religious zealotry. In fact, the example you bring up feels extra fucked considering that fucking company goes out of its way to donate to anti-LGBTQ organizations.
Thr right will tell a basketball player to "shut up and dribble" and a burger joint oughta only make fucking burgers then.
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Cultural issues =/= politics
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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.
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Lmao, that name though. "Our virtue is a con."
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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.
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Wasn't there an OSHA case filed by an employee who was very badly burned there?
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This sounds like a plot point from the OA.
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Adobe.
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I use good on you app to find ethical, bio brands. It's hard to find good companies, but they do exist.
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what is a bio brand?
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Organic?
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I haven't heard of this app, will defo check it out
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For the big makers of pseudo-science based bullshit medicine, see Weleda (naturopathy, anthroposophy) and Boiron (homeopathy).
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The POM Wonderful company
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Along with Fiji Water and Teleflora.
Basically anything touched by Stewart Resnick, the wealthiest American “farmer” and water pirate.
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If the company you work for is bought by Alpine Investments, get a lawyer. Especially if you're a woman or expect severance when they ditch you.
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Red Ventures. They buy up web properties, fire everyone, and turn them into ai-generated click farms. For example, C|Net. They steal from their employees too.
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Anything on the stock market
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IMO most of the suggestions here are small beer.
If you want to be very scientific about this, and to calculate cumulative sums of harm, with no discount for the future, then just look for some little-known hydrocarbons corp - it will top the list.
If you apply a future discount, but no discount (or a small one) for the suffering of non-human animals, then some meat company will probably top the list.
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