Corporations have been around for centuries and have been front and center regarding misleading the public, ranging from times of the Industrial Revolution to modern day society. Many of these corporations intentionally mislead the public for their financial gain and to increase their market share.
This kind of corruption has been around for centuries ever since big corporations have been a prominent day to day “necessity” for living in the United States and a vast majority of countries around the world. These deceptive corporations can be part of tech, food, and shipping industries. The corporations can also be part of various other industries not listed above.
The first example of a corporation deceiving the customer is Amazon, which decided to enroll users in their Amazon Prime service without their consent. This enrollment of Amazon Prime resulted in many users trying to cancel their subscriptions, which charges users $15 a month. The process of canceling was made tediously complicated by Amazon to deter them from canceling the subscription, via burying the cancellation menu regarding Amazon Prime and trying to convince the customer to keep their subscription. Amazon has also mistreated their workers continuously over the past few years and thwarted the creation of a union being created in Alabama which would have greatly benefited their workers.
Secondly, the cereal company Kellogg’s falsely advertised a new cereal, Frosted Mini Wheats, back in 2009. Their advertising claimed that children who ate Mini Wheats had increased attentiveness by 20%, which their studies they referenced only had 1 of 9 participants achieve that increase in attentiveness.
A civil lawsuit reached a settlement deal which ended up reimbursing customers who bought the cereal from 2008-2009 via FTC complaints. Kellogg’s is also infamous for trying to fire 1,400 union workers back in 2021, but failed at doing so and reached an agreement with the union and all union workers kept their jobs.
Lastly, the corporation Nvidia, specializing in creating graphic cards and various other technologies, has also unfortunately misled customers. Nvidia has repeatedly in the past misled consumers with their charts and stats regarding the performance of their graphics cards.
The gaming community focuses on rasterization numbers, performance directly produced from the graphics card without technologies inflating the number of frames generated, which Nvidia doesn’t mention directly in any of their promotion and mentions in tiny text at the bottom of many of their slides that the graphs are based off their frame generation technology. This technology inflates the number of frames produced by the graphics card and isn’t supported by all games, which misleads the average customer to think the graphics card is faster than the last generation of graphics cards.
Many reports from reviewers mention minimal performance gains on the 4060ti model which is considered the most infamous of that generation of graphics card.
Fortunately, there are many ways consumers can prevent these practices in the future, here are a few ways to show dissatisfaction with a company:
Going on Strike: This method involves workers of the companies refusing to work in mass numbers and protesting. Going on strike goes hand in hand with being in a union to help negotiate better working conditions and pay rates. Some notable examples recently include the Writer’s Strike of 2023 and the United Auto Workers Strike of 2023.
Boycotting: As a very famous example of protest, boycotting has been a very effective way of making change happen. Boycotting is the act of abstaining from purchasing products from a company and not supporting them directly because of something they have done.
One famous example of boycotting includes the Montgomery Bus Boycotts which helped advance the civil rights movement for African Americans in the mid 1950s. This boycott resulted in the supreme court decision Browder v. Gayle which ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Some more examples of a boycott are the recent boycotts against Starbucks and McDonalds. Starbucks is being boycotted due to the company censoring their unions rightful freedom of speech regarding supporting Palestine on Twitter, and McDonalds is being boycotted regarding their support of Israeli soldiers and Israel as a whole.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report: An FTC report would require customers to file a complaint directly to the FTC which regulates corporations and their practices. Customers can report false advertising and misleading advertising directly to hopefully change the corporation’s practices.
Overall, there are many ways consumers can combat misleading corporations and stand up for workers’ rights. Standing up for these types of things make positive impacts on the public and improves quality of life for everyone.
Disclaimer: Articles designated as “Editorial” represent the views and opinions of the author, not the 2023-2024 Periscope staff, CHS/CASD administration, or the CHS student body.
