On this post, I will examine two blog posts by fellow peers and provide my take on them. This will primarily be my opinion.

Blog Post #1: You Should Give A Damn About Your Bad Reputation by Megan Binder

Right off the bat, a very opinionated piece about corporations committing heinous acts and unethical behavior. She accuses two big companies, Apple and Toyota, for exploiting workers and endangering their drivers (respectively).

We don’t want to look at pictures like this

In the case of Apple, it’s 100% true and well-known that the working conditions in China are disgusting and the wages sickening; however, we as consumers do not care. Apple’s brand is so massive that any scandal or news story exposing their lack of morals are immediately and blindly protected by fans. How were sales effected after the story about suicide nets was released? Eh, not that much; this isn’t because what they did wasn’t wrong or media turning a blind eye, it’s because Apple consumers just don’t care.

Toyota and other car manufacturers have a long history of letting faulty products sell. I talked about this in my previous blog post where faulty cars caused multiple deaths before the government decided to intervene. But again, we don’t care. We don’t care that Honda cheaped out on a $2 part; we don’t care if their employees die early deaths; we do not care about the latest recall because we would buy a Toyota anyways. That’s because it isn’t in the public’s eye for long; another story about an actress going to rehab or some new disease will divert our attention as they sweep it under the rug.

Blog Post #2: Creating Shared Value: too good to be true? By Sakiko Toriya

Ok, so this tackles the issues of the idea of shared value: primarily that it ignores how society’s problem got here. In a broad sense, shared value almost seems like a diversion, and a poor one at that. A cynical view could be that the businesses have some corporate interest in giving back. McDonald’s sponsoring youth soccer teams? I don’t know if that excuses them God-only-knows

If they really cared, they would cook with healthier ingredients    

what to millions of kids after the game (I mean really, what is pink slime?); it definitely doesn’t fix the amount of obesity caused by fast food. The point is, corporations should try to correct the negative externality they create in the world; I just don’t know if what they are doing is really helping the problems they have created. A better way to create shared value is spending more money for sustainable, environmentally-friendly, healthy inputs… but that would hurt their bottom line.

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