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
I’m now boycotting GEO Group. Henceforth, I will only do IRL heist missions in places where there’s a public prison option.
The Sinclair monopoly is an invisible part of why Trump is in office. Local news doesn’t really exist anymore.
I think we'd compile a shorter list if we tried to name wholesome, respectable companies.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Stopped shopping at Trader Joe's after their anti union shenanigans. Shame because we love their food
Menards. They have a history of dumping waste illegally and then daring the DNR to sue them. One example:
Red Bull, they are nazis and spread fake news about conspiracy theories on their own TV network in Austria. Source
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.
Oracle is so shitty to its customers there’s multiple law firms that specialize in helping customers sue them.
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.
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.
College Board. Maker of the SAT
Fuck College Board with a rake. Seriously awful when college is already so expensive.
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
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.
HSBC - how many times can a bank be caught laundering dirty money and still exist?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Mormons, Inc.”
GNC. The vitamin stores. They knowingly sell expired merchandise and withhold commissions from their employees.
Mark all corporations off your list. Corporations don't care about the consumer. Only your money, which supports their shareholders.
Adobe.
For the big makers of pseudo-science based bullshit medicine, see Weleda (naturopathy, anthroposophy) and Boiron (homeopathy).
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.
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".
I use good on you app to find ethical, bio brands. It's hard to find good companies, but they do exist.
The POM Wonderful company
Along with Fiji Water and Teleflora.
Basically anything touched by Stewart Resnick, the wealthiest American “farmer” and water pirate.
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