Month: September 2012

View original articles on this topic here and here.

With the new release of Apple’s new iOS6 software update, it has become the new dinner table topic of this week. As with every apple release, debate has become to rise over the pros and cons of the newest product. This time, controversy revolves around Apple’s new navigation system that has replaced the old Google Maps. As well, they have removed Google’s built-in Youtube app, which has now become a stand-alone app.

The reason behind this motion is unclear, but the overall consensus is that Apple has become “the old Microsoft”, where their profits and interests come before their customers’. Slowly, Apple is beginning to monopolize this niche and its market, in an attempt to erase and counteract all of the company’s potential competition.

From researching the potential selfishness of this company, as well as reading Matthew Kan’s blog post about Apple exploiting child labour, their business ethics/values are highly questionable. But will knowing of their unethical behaviour prevent consumers from purchasing their products? What makes Apple so successful to the point where people would choose to turn a blind eye, and purchase merely for the idea of owning an Apple product?

In classmate Tanner Kirkpatricks’s blog post, he speaks of Nestle’s “usage of children as laborers in the production of their cocoa,” where “over 600,000 children are working on cocoa farms for little or no pay in excruciating working conditions.” Child labour has been a problem constantly discussed worldwide, and many large organizations, such as Free the Children, have devoted their entirety in attempting to solve the problem, and spread awareness. It is disappointing, yet unfortunately not a surprise, that large corporations simliar to Nestle have exploited child labour in an attempt to optimize their profits margins. After reading the post, as well as articles on Nestle’s lack of business ethics, I, too, disagree with their corrupt practices.

In our Comm101 class, business ethics was a fundamental lesson taught from the beginning, and was stressed of high importance. It was emphasized that the correct business ethics be imbedded into our minds, so we wouldn’t be lured into following unethical ways by countless temptations in our future endeavours.

So how come a group of young students sitting in a lecture can understand the importance of being ethical, but large corporations cannot? Are the temptations of moneymaking truly that enticing?

THE FACTS:

Everyday, the McDonald’s franchise continues to expand worldwide; recently, the company has proposed the opening of two new franchises in Amritsar and Katra, two of India’s most religious locations. Hindu nationalist group furiously protests that these expansion are an insult to their race/culture, referring to McDonald’s as “an organization associated with cow slaughter,” and still deciding to locate in the land of the sacred cow.

Although both McDonald’s restaurants proposes to have vegetarian menus out of respect for the religious nature of such locations, people firmly protest it as a deliberate insult to their culture.

— View full articles here and here —

THE THOUGHTS:

From a business standpoint, this proposal is a great investment, and could potentially be quite profitable. However, is it necessary to expand the franchise in locations that would potential infuriate a large population? McDonald’s has plenty of other potentially successful business opportunities, so why cause controversy and bad press? Is McDonald’s simply too powerful to even bother with the “minute” problems of these franchises? Although making these restaurants “vegetarian” is commendable, in my opinion, ethics come before money-making, and I believe that religion is a sacred part of life that nobody should tamper with.