i’ve often joked that ticketmaster is the third most-hated company in the world – after microsoft and the united states federal government. people like to pick the nits in that statement, but i use it to make a point… and sometimes the point is made (sometimes not \ud83d\ude42 ).<\/p>\n
there are evil companies in this world, and some of them grow to be evil empires. many of these are transient, especially in the technology business. sco is collecting a lot of hate these days. and sunncomm got a quick dose too. i’ve got a heaping spoonful for diebold. history is full of them, and there’s probably a very tight correlation between monopoly (literal or perceived) and the tendency to abuse customers and create the hate, but someone else is going to have to do that study.<\/p>\n
sometimes, however, an evil company or evil empire manages to spin their image just enough to avoid getting too much negative attention. i think this is getting harder to do, but my favorite example – and my personal most-hated-company is none other than walmart. it’s an amazing study. walmart doesn’t get my business.<\/p>\n
a little over a year ago, martin kuz wrote a piece<\/a> for cleveland scene which was, for me, all the confirmation i needed.<\/p>\n In the last six years, judges have slapped the company with at least 75 sanctions for destroying, altering, and hiding evidence, according to documents filed in numerous suits against Wal-Mart across the country. It has racked up millions in court fines for destroying photos of accident scenes, denying it performed safety studies, and concealing company records.<\/p>\n At first blush, 75 violations amid thousands of cases seems an irrelevant percentage — except that the number appears to represent more sanctions than those of all other Fortune 500 companies combined.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n say what you will about their business acumen, about the economic impact of the “walmartization” of america, about their bullying tactics<\/a>, about their economic power<\/a> or about anything this company does, good or bad. for me, this falls into the category of “repeat corporate offender” – and an incredibly harsh sanction is in order. obviously the penalties levied against walmart aren’t doing enough to change behavior. for a company this size, it’s just a line item in the budget.<\/p>\n here’s my little bit of light on walmart. it’s time to demand better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" i’ve often joked that ticketmaster is the third most-hated company in the world – after microsoft and the united states federal government. people like to pick the nits in that statement, but i use it to make a point… and sometimes the point is made (sometimes not \ud83d\ude42 ). there are evil companies in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n