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Companies who have managed to build empires and reputations don’t let go of either of those things easily – they will do everything in their power to bury, or dismiss, or simply rewrite history when it turns out they were on the wrong side of it.
Which is why these 13 companies – who have decent reputations these days – should give their marketing firms a bonus…because few people remember the actual horrors that litter their pasts.
Now… let it be said that these are comments from people on the Internet, not stories from journalists.
So treat them as such.
Cool?
Cool.
13. Bananas.
I’d probably say Chiquita (formerly the United Fruit Company). What I thought was an innocent fruit company has actually been involved in American intervention in Latin America for decades.
I don’t remember all of the details so I could be wrong, but here’s an example. When the then-president of Guatemala Jacobo Árbenz instituted land reforms that would’ve taken away a large chunk of United Fruit land, United Fruit lobbied to the CIA and argued that the government was aligned with the Soviets. Moreover, the Director of the CIA at the time, Allen Dulles, was a board member of United Fruit. His brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, worked for a corporate firm that represented United Fruit. There were a lot more people in government who had deep ties to United Fruit. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Árbenz was fucked; the CIA overthrew him.
After the overthrow the CIA installed a military dictatorship that reversed the land reforms and exacted revenge on trade unions among other groups/people aligned with Árbenz. This and other like interventions led to the coinage of the term “Banana republic” to describe such a servile dictatorship.”
12. They were nothing if not organized.
IBM sold the Nazis punch card computers to keep track of every person in concentration camps. The computers also kept the trains running on time.
Not only that. They set up a subsidiary with Germany specifically to do this, even though America said American companies weren’t allowed to do business with them anymore. It wasn’t even like “IBM built computers and the Nazis bought them.”
They specifically set up a secret company and designed these computers especially for them. Apparently it’s why they don’t ever give interviews.
11. The way I just wrinkled my nose…
Henry Ford helped with the invention of square dancing because “ Ford hated jazz; he hated the Charleston.
He also really hated Jewish people, and believed that Jewish people invented jazz as part of a nefarious plot to corrupt the masses and take over the world—a theory that might come as a surprise to the black people who actually did invent it.”
10. Nothing ever changes.
H&M is now recognized and beloved as a sustainable, eco-friendly company with great worker rights but they used to be really corrupt and would use underpaid workers in 3rd world countries who worked in horrible and dangerous conditions, they also used to use horrible cheap materials that would cause massive pollution and wouldn’t be able to be recycled….oh wait, they still do that, my bad you guys!
Oh! Don’t forget that H&M is one of the brands that use forced labor of the Uighurs in the concentration camps.
We are in 2021 and their clothes are literally made by slaves.
9. It keeps going away, under the rug.
Wells Fargo, not sure they’re entirely viewed positive today but they’ve been full of crooks for years.
that whole controversy like a year or two ago where they opened alternate accounts under customers names (without informing those customers) just to have an excuse to charge more fees and inflate their profits?
They also f*ck around with your mortgage. I had a boss once who complained at least once every few months about how Wells Fargo penalized him for trying to pay more than the minimum monthly payment.
God forbid you act responsibly and pay the debt off sooner. 😛
8. Cheap labor.
Let’s not forget Mitsubishi used P.O.W. slave labor during WW2.
had a great grandpa who was a marine who fought in the pacific theater, and hated mitsubishi with a passion. refused to speak to my dad for 2 weeks after my dad bought a mitsubishi car.
never understood why until my dad handed me a model of a mitsubishi Zero and then explained to me how he watched a lot of his buddies die due to kamikaze pilots flying mitsubishi zero’s crash into hangers and buildings.
7. Well that’s completely awful,
Quaker Oats!
They fed radioactive oatmeal to autistic and disabled children to study the effects, without informing the children or the parents. This was from the mid 1940’s to the mid 1950’s.
There’s actually a LOT of sources.
The two most prominent places this occurred are Wrentham State School and Fernald School. Basic overview helpfully packaged for anyone who doesn’t want to google “quaker oats radioactive”
Also, the youtuber Illuminaughtii did a video on this and she lists her own sources in the description.
6. There are other whiskeys.
James Jameson bought and fed a girl to a cannibal tribe.
It’s highly debated if it’s true. However he wrote about it himself personally but he was also consider to be a bat sh%t crazy.
Which is saying something coming from an Irish family with a sh%t ton of money and an unlimited whiskey supply.
5. No one becomes a billionaire for free.
Microsoft under Bill Gates and Steve Balmer paid staff to sabotage competitor’s software.
Later on, one of the first instances of this got named “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run”.
As an analogy, pretend Microsoft made and sold Michelin tires; it was like they paid people to go in to parking lots and slash your car’s tires if you had bought Bridgestone, Goodyear, Yokohama, or Pirelli. It did make Bill Gates one of the richest men in the world, though.
4. Say it ain’t so.
Apparently Apple. They were knowingly using child labour for about 3 years along with using people in concentration camps in China to manufacture their parts.
They sure did use people in concentration camps to manufacture their parts! Along with all these other companies who also used forced labor from Uighur Muslims in Chinese internment camps:
Abercrombie & Fitch, Acer, Adidas, Alstom, Amazon, ASUS, BAIC Motor, Bestway, BMW, Bombardier, Bosch, BYD, Calvin Klein, Candy, Carter’s, Cerruti 1881, Changan Automobile, Cisco, CRRC, Dell, Electrolux, Fila, Founder Group, GAC Group (automobiles), Gap, Geely Auto, General Motors, Google, Goertek, H&M, Haier, Hart Schaffner Marx, Hisense, Hitachi, HP, HTC, Huawei, iFlyTek, Jack & Jones, Jaguar, Japan Display Inc., L.L.Bean, Lacoste, Land Rover, Lenovo, LG, Li-Ning, Mayor, Meizu, Mercedes-Benz, MG, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Nike, Nintendo, Nokia, Oculus, Oppo, Panasonic, Polo Ralph Lauren, Puma, SAIC Motor, Samsung, SGMW, Sharp, Siemens, Skechers, Sony, TDK, Tommy Hilfiger, Toshiba, Tsinghua Tongfang, Uniqlo, Victoria’s Secret, Vivo, Volkswagen, Xiaomi, Zara, Zegna, ZTE
3. Bloody hands all around.
Boy, my time to shine has come. One december day in 2017, when I was between schools and doing odd jobs, I was doing a sort of promotional thing for a company called Degusa. They’re a German company, who today specializes in Gold and other precious metals. Essentially, me and the others occupied several positions in Zurich’s main station to hand out chocolates and flyers to passersby.
Well, the day goes on, I go home, and tell my dad about what I did today, as you do. He goes on to explain how that company was in the headlines shortly after WWII for manufacturing Zyklon B, the pesticide used in the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps. They’re viewed fairly ok, but this is a stain on their history.
2. How do we not learn about this?
Union Carbide. Dark history? Hawk’s Mountain.
It’s been called America’s worst industrial disaster. The construction of a three-mile-long tunnel to carry the New River through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia cost as many as 2,000 workers their lives.
At least 764 of the 1,213 men who worked underground at Hawk’s Nest for at least two months died within five years of the tunnel’s completion, having contracted silicosis as the result of drilling through miles of rock to build a hydro-electric plant for Union Carbide, which owned the tunnel.
Some 5,000 men worked on the project from March 1930 to December 1931, earning 25 cents an hour and working 60 hours a week. Many of the workers were African-American, and came to West Virginia to work on the project. As they began getting sick with what company doctors called “tunnelitis,” they were unable to return to their homes and those who didn’t die in their beds in the company-owned worker camps were driven out of town to die in nearby towns or were put on trains and sent home.
1. The mafia loved them.
Not quite as dark as others, but Nintendo started out as a failing business.
At the same time, everyone stopped making Hanafuda cards because they had become popular with the Yakuza.
So Nintendo saw this as a perfect opportunity and their cards were very popular with organized crime bosses.
In the 60s and 70s, these cards were no longer quite as popular and Nintendo tried all sorts of ventures (a taxi service, a disc-shape remote control vacuum cleaner, their own brand of LEGO-like bricks).
One of these was a love hotel – essentially a hotel where one would arrange a meeting with a prostitute. They eventually settled on video games.
Humans have such a capacity for terror and lies, don’t you think?
What other companies belong on this list? Tell us why in the comments!
