I was thinking about this after listening to Marc Andreassen blather on about how he doesn’t trust government as a repository of trusted keys and other functions. He advocates for private companies to perform critical functions. Standard libertarian stuff in many respects.
The problem of course is that corporations lack accountability. They can shift terms and conditions or corporate purpose and there is little meaningful recourse except to stop using them. I can think of small examples that don’t widely resonate (Mountain Equipment Co-op I’m thinking of you 🤬) but are there big examples that I’m missing?
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Off the top of my head it has to be Google, with the “Don’t be evil” bit, although if Amazon still just sold books and DVDs they would be much less of a problem.
Watch out for Costco in a few years, that place is already culty and the folks in charge ain’t the same ones that want to keep a hotdog $1.50
I actually got rid of my Costco membership this year and swapped over to BJs. It’s a smaller wholesale chain, but their prices are much better and the inventory they have is also better imo.
I’d like BJs too but I don’t get them around here
Does this mean what I think it means?
Uhhhhh. Me too?
Wait, what’s going on with Costco?
Just predicting a heel turn
The nice thing about Costco is that people can more easily protest by canceling memberships. Not to say they won’t take off the mask like every other corporation at some point, but it’s easier to have a direct effect.
You’re right, but I feel like it’s unlikely people will do so considering economic conditions and the cultic milieu around the business
It’s that cultic milieu that can be (at least somewhat) broken with the right boneheaded corporate move, though. Economic conditions and general apathy though, not so much.
Costco is a godsend in San Francisco, and I was always given to understand the employees are treated well. I’m gonna be really bummed if it does take a heel turn.
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Elon’s Twitter is the most flagrant in recent memory. Chiquita used to be the poster child for corporate greed. Temu is supposedly using slavery to make goods.
Maybe not the biggest, but the most recent (and easy answer) would be Unity and Hasbro for their licensing bullshit
They can all go suck a lemon. Shell , coke , nestle , google, Microsoft, Netflix and rest. Fuck the lot of them
Fucking MEC, why did you have to remind me and ruin my morning? Tabarnak 🤬
What did MEC do? I never heard of them before last month when I bought a backpack while visiting Canada.
MEC used to be the Canadian equivalent to REI. The “C” in MEC stood for “cooperative,” as in cooperative corporation. Members are supposed to be part-owners and have a say in how the business is run. Despite that, in 2020 the MEC board sold the company to a US firm without consulting the member-owners.
And ever since then it has enshitified. Their Merino used to be affordable and 100% Merino. Then it went to Merino/Nylon blend, which is passable, at least nylon adds strength. And now it’s like 60~70% polyester and more expensive then it used to be. It’s literally the same as Uniqlo “Merino”
Shit it’s worse than that. They broke the cooperative so owners like me got no consideration in the deal. The groundwork had been laid for years - slowly freezing enthusiasts out of the board in favour of people with retail experience. The next phase was changing product mix to increase sale volumes over the best equipment for your sport.
I noticed it several years ago when I went to talk about paddles and the kid there said he hadn’t been trained on that area yet. And I was like “trained? Don’t you paddle?” And the kid said he’d bought a bike after he started working there but didn’t really have a sport.
Wait, what the fuck!?
6 June 2013: Xbox One will have always-online DRM
19 June 2013: Xbox One will not have always-online DRM
Anyone beat 13 days?
Blockbuster. Once one of the mightiest businesses, then reduced to ash due to one very unfortunate mistake.
23 March: (National food store) CEO says “Customers sets the price point.” after it’s revealed that prices were raised much more than the inflation and pressure from the public says to lower prices.
27 March: (Same national food store) Lowers the prices after several other stores lowered theirs.
But government also lacks accountability. At least with corporations there are multiples of them, and so they are accountable to the standards established by the market.
Governments are monopolistic by nature. It’s not impossible but it’s orders of magnitude harder to switch governments than it is to switch corporate service providers.
And while our constitution and those of many other countries promise a degree of accountability, those constitutions are violated all the time.
So ultimately corporations are held to an evolving standard that they cannot escape which is market expectations based on what their competitors are offering.
Governments are held to a rigid but changeable standard that they can easily escape by deciding not to enforce those standards upon themselves.
Governments are self-regulated and corporations are market-regulated, meaning a government can slip the leash much more easily and choose to ignore that regulation.
The accountability is both legal and electoral. Neither is necessarily easy, but this is dramatically different than the legal framework that applies to corporations.
I don’t want to clog up the thread with examples, but you don’t need to search too hard to find examples of minor harms that aren’t worth any individuals time to sue.
Class actions are supposed to be the antidote but wind up enriching the filing lawyers and the named plaintiff. Everyone else gets a coupon for $1.27 off their next purchase.
Here’s one I just ran across shortly after writing this.
Booz Allen is a private company that runs recreation.gov and sets it’s own fees to pay itself.
Somebody sued and won saying that fees charged for access to national parks were meant only for park maintenance and therefore the fees were illegal. They won! And then…nothing.
Technically everyone who paid a booking fee to access an American National park in the last decade is entitled to a refund. Not a penny appears to be forthcoming because fuck you, that’s why.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back
