Cus Lubin and Mamta Badkar state that “McDonald’s serves 1% of the world’s population every day”. That is equivalent to over 70 million people in the world. As most of us know, the traditional McDonald’s food tends to be unhealthy due to its excess amount of calories, fat, saturated fat, sugar, and salt. These may increase the chance of obesity and can potentially lead to illnesses such as heart diseases, stroke, and diabetes. Even though many people are attracted to McDonald’s food because of its convenience and reasonably pricing, many people argues that it is not business ethical for McDonald’s to sell such unhealthy products.

As the trend of dieting and healthy lifestyles are growing in recent years, McDonald’s, as the leader of the fast food chains, has introduced many new, healthy products, such as Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken, with their nutritional facts available online. McDonald’s is attempting to expand its original market to also include people who are health-conscious. Now consumers have options to choose whether they would like to eat healthy, or unhealthy. Through changing its strategy from cost leadership to focus strategy (differentiation) by adding new alternatives for consumers, McDonald’s is able to build up a better brand image.

Link of references:

– http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/generic.shtml

– http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/sparkdining-eatery.asp?id=3

– http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/fast-food-is-the-unhealthy-choice-mcdonalds-tells-its-own-staff-9025364.html

It may seem like the construction of Rana Plaza is unethical as their workers “suffered from long working hours, [and were abused by their] employees”. However, through analyzing from a different perspective, I discover that most workers may rather have a job with “comparatively higher salary” than having no jobs, or jobs with low pays. Even though following social customs and business ethics may seem to be beneficial for workers of the company from a third person’s point of view, this may not necessarily be true for the workers. Most workers have a family to feed and relies mainly from the income they earned by building the Rana Plaza. In such harsh and realistic society, they may rather choose to be abused in long working hours than starving their families.

According to the article, Return of the graveyard shift; Night working, it states that “in many rich, highly unionised countries, workers regard night shifts as a good thing, since they provide jobs”. Night working may be consider as unethical as people normally sleeps at night and working during nighttime is against the regular sleeping schedule for most people. In this case, employees would rather night working than not working. Therefore, when evaluating whether a business is ethical or unethical, it is important to judge from multiple perspectives and the advantages and disadvantages for each stakeholders.

Links of references:
– https://blogs.ubc.ca/yi1996/2014/09/09/business-ethics/
– http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/1040403926

On June 7, 2013, the information from a top secret document was leaked into the public, in which it suggested that the National Security Agency had been operating an undisclosed program called Prism. NSA claimed to have direct access to the online personal materials that are supposed to be “private” to search engines, social media, and electronics retailers. Companies, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and  Verizon, were revealed that they had joined the Prism since the earliest date of December 2007. NSA claimed that the purpose of operating such program was to track suspected foreign terrorists under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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Does this suggest that business ethics and users’ privacy should be ignored when confronting government enforcement? When the government enforces law against social privacy, a company must weigh the importance between protecting the users’ privacy and maintaining its business ethics, or damaging the relationship between the company and the government. If the decision was done by myself, I would allow the government to track my users’ data but only under the full acknowledgement and consent of my clients. What would be your thoughts if you are the CEO of the company and has to make the same decision?

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