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.
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.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Mormons, Inc.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bank of New York Melon
All restaurants
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.
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.
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.
I think we’d compile a shorter list if we tried to name wholesome, respectable companies.
Nah, we have loads of great companies here in the UK.
Didn’t the UK develop the first large evil corporation?
It sure did!
among more brutality around the world, yes
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.
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.”
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.
They’re also 100% Chinese owned. It’s the major turnoff for me with their Path of Exile titles.
lesser known
It’s lesser known to people who go outside
And tbh I never knew about that so thanks for sharing!
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.
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.
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.
Where would you recommend donating instead?
Depending on your feelings about the Catholic Church, you might look into donating to the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
Where I grew up there were also some smaller independent thrift stores run by neighborhood religious organizations or other nonprofits on their own steam. You might check for any in your area.
I understand the viewpoint, but the alternative is that disabled people get hired way less or not at all. A real solution would be to reduce our dependence on capitalism or something, but that’s not likely.
God I (as a disabled woman) am SO sick of seeing this take every time this conversation happens, like it’s chill and okay to give us less rights.
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.
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.
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
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.
