People Share The Dirty Secrets That Made Them Stop Supporting A Company

Poor Working Conditions

"Ashley Furniture—abysmal OSHA record, repeat and willful violations."

"People are not expendable."

~ surfinwifsharks

"I assure you, it's worse."

"That's just what OSHA made public, but I live near their factory in Arcadia and know people who work there, or used to work there."

"Someone bled for your dresser."

~ Wild_Question_9272

"I used to work as the lead designer for BLUENOTES in Canada. YM Inc knowingly uses near slave and child labour and denies everything in the press, but they do know, and they don't care."

"Money is more important."

~ Pkactus

"I used to work for Goodwill and in the back I saw one of my coworkers who has a physical and mental handicap come out of the office of our store manager crying. I really liked this coworker, I remember her as one of the nicest people I've ever known."

"I asked her what was wrong and she said that her wages were going to be cut substantially. She stated the store manager was told by corporate that it was since she was not able to work as fast as others in the back doing pricing.

"I asked if she would mind if I asked what they had cut it to and she said $3.30 an hour."

"WTF!"

"It turns out that Goodwill has a policy to pay disabled workers the legal subminimum wage."

"Sec 14 (c) allows corporations to pay people with disabilities a subminimum wage. According to Labor Department records, Goodwill pays some of its disabled workers as low as $0.22, $0.38 and $0.41 per hour depending on the state laws."

"Goodwill does not show much goodwill towards their workers."

~ Red_Beard_of_Tucson

Questionable Spending

"Susan G. Komen for the Cure."

"The pink ribbon is a scam!"

~ worldsokayestmomx3

"Most people also don't realize it just because something is pink, has a ribbon on it, says breast cancer on the front or is sold in October it doesn't necessarily benefit anything other than the company that made it!"

"There are no patents or trademarks on pink ribbons that mean that anytime it's used it has to benefit breast cancer research or awareness. Literally anybody can sell something pink with a ribbon and it doesn't mean a damn thing for actual cancer patients."

~ Crystal_crone

Shady Business Practices

"H&R Block used to do something like this with their tax preparation service. Not sure if they still do."

"Their slogan was something like, 'Come on in and we'll tell you if there's mistakes in your self-prepared return, for free!'."

"So you go in, they spend 5 minutes looking at your self-prepared return, and they tell you, 'Yes, indeed, there are mistakes here'."

"And then you ask them to tell you what the mistakes are. And that's when they tell you it'll cost $75 for them to tell you."

~ whomp1970

"Intuit lobbied the government to keep taxes complex."

"F*ck TurboTax."

~ lifesavingsgoboom

"Angie’s List (aka Angi). Did work for a person and they left a good review on Angie’s List.

"Next thing I know I’ve got a guy from their call center blowing up my phone. He wanted me to pay them to put more good reviews under my company’s name and to steer potential customers towards my business for an additional fee."

"Basically everything they say they don’t do on their ads. I’m sure it was a trustworthy company when Angie still owned it, but it’s scammy as hell now."

~ Tangboy50000

"My mother is terminally ill and closing her business. Angie’s List called about promotion and she kept saying no."

"Finally had to tell them she was dying."

"They offered her a cheaper promotion. They suck."

~ StitchingKitty897

"The sheer amount of people who still use uTorrent, even among my friends boggles my mind."

"It's basically an adware at this point. They even used to bundle a cryptominer at one point that secretly used your computer to mine bitcoin (or some other crypto)."

"ALWAYS use open-source Torrent clients."

~ vpsj

"There is a vintage toy store chain near me called the Toy Vault. The owner, Dan, has been ripping people off for years, offering them very little money for their toy collections."

"He treats his employees terribly. Many toy collectors in the area have their own Dan story."

"One time a couple of years ago I was setting up a pop-up shop to sell a massive collection of toys that my friend's parents had hoarded."

"We had been advertising for a couple weeks and were excited to make some people happy offering great deals on a lot of cool toys."

"The Thursday prior to opening Dan messaged me asking if there was a price we'd sell the whole collection for, saying that he could bring a truck that night and rid us of the burden."

"I said no because neither of us had the time and told him he could come Saturday with the rest of the buyers."

"He replied angrily calling me an 'amature' and said that if we were 'serious about selling' we would make the time, and that he knows we shop at his stores."

"Well I don't anymore, Dan."

~ ancient_scully

"There used to be a comics and collectibles store near me that was run by the same type of people. They would take the current month's comics and bag them and mark them up by at least 50%, so you would have to pay a premium for even the most recent issues."

"If they thought the comics were going to be hot, the marked them up even more). They were pretty much the only comics store in the area, and they were one of the few that sold a lot of independent comics, so it sucked that I had to boycott them."

"What's worse was their policy towards collectibles and action figures—the owner would buy case upon case of whatever the latest fad toy was and pull out the rarest figures and charge $100+ for them."

"Then he would drive his pre-teen son to the local Toys R Us with the rest of the figures, and have the kid walk in and claim that he had gotten all of them for his birthday, but he didn't want them, so could he trade them in for store credit.

"At the time, Toys R Us had a pretty loose policy towards returns—if you brought in something still sealed in its original box and it was an item they sold, you could get store credit for it. This worked for a while, but eventually this guy was banned from every Toys R Us within like an hour's drive."

"Eventually, the comics and action figures craze died down and this guy went out of business shortly thereafter."

~ WaldoJeffers65

"Companies like BetterHelp (mental health platform) exploit clients data/info and breached privacy."

"Yet they still advertise everywhere. Somewhere like 3 lawsuits about it."

~ Friendly-Jump-5307

"Therapist here. BretterHelp is total garbage."

"I feel bad for the clients who go through several green therapists to find someone who's actually a good fit and then the therapist leaves (understandably) because BetterHelp treats and pays them so poorly."

~ SpuddyBud

"The Weather Channel app collected and sold user location data without disclosing it would it be shared with advertisers."

~ KawIsTheLaw

"I will never buy anything from LG."

"Sometime around 2008ish, they (like many other hardware/software companies) were messing around with what was essentially adware, seeing how far they could push things to get borderline-malicious advertising onto your home computer."

"Stuff like the pile of CDs that came with your new Gateway, the 'do you also want to install X, Y and Z? We're going to imply it's necessary' when installing messaging apps, or the huge unnecessary printer 'software suite' when all you needed was the driver."

"LG went a step further."

"LG embedded adware in the firmware of their CD/DVD drives."

"Every time you opened or closed the drive, you'd get a little popup from your system tray that served you an ad—pretty much indistinguishable from the legions of adware/spyware your aunt would get from clicking 'yes' to all her popup ads."

"Except nobody clicked yes on anything, and it couldn't be removed. It was embedded in the drive itself, essentially performing an AutoPlay exploit on a virtual drive to show you the ads, then disappear again."

"They eventually were threatened with legal action and had to post a firmware update/removal tool on their website.

"The ad software was called BlueBirds, and LG scrubs all mentions of it from their Wikipedia article every now and then."

~ DJ33

Cruelty And Greed

"Nissan spent a decade ruining the life of the guy who owned nissan.com."

~ zonker77

"Crumbl Cookies. Their VP of HR did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on LinkedIn that I happened to see because they are fairly local and I have a few mutual connections."

"Anyway, she went off on why they were always understaffed in an area because 'everyone one else is paying above market value for employees and [we] only want to pay market value and hire people passionate about [our] brand and making cookies'."

"It really rubbed me the wrong way, because if everyone else is paying more than you it doesn’t mean they are paying above market value, it means you are paying below market value."

"I haven’t been back since, besides they also sued another company for also selling cookies in square boxes… and honestly the other companies cookies taste better."

~ Luckyfinger7

While we as consumers and customers can't directly dictate anyone else's morals or ethics, we can choose who we will and won't give our money to.

Use your buying power wisely.