Civil unrest is the one situation where corporations hope everyone forgets they exist.

This would be the most American thing possible.
The success of the protests would be measured by how much profit they created.
Businesses would buy fire insurance, then give Molotov cocktails to rioters in front of branch locations trying to unionize.
Megaphone speeches would include messages from the sponsors.

corporate success for companies as huge as McDonald’s or Coca-Cola rely on the broadest appeal. that means being politically agnostic. aligning with anyone would alienate at least some of their customer base and cost them tremendous amounts of money. so they just stay as neutral as possible.

Surely that would have to be changed to “No Burger Kings”. Wouldn’t have the same impact.

I’m unsure whether it would be cringe or clever if McDonalds went all in on the No Kings protest, claiming that they misunderstood the concept and thought it was against Burger King.

Would you buy burgers from burger king if they sponsored people yelling outside abortion clinics?

Sponsoing protests would be a great way to lose half your customers. You won’t make up for it by selling more burgers to the protesters sympathisers.

because then they would be punished by the trump administration. he would have govt agencies cone up with reasons to investigate them, take away their tax breaks, etc.

the point of a company is to make money, that’s it.

Large brands, like MacDonalds, avoid controversy because their business model depends on appealing to the widest possible audience. Their goal is to keep people consuming whether that means buying products, eating, or staying at their establishments.

Supporting movements like “No Kings” or any form of protest risks alienating a significant portion of potential customers.

There is no upside to taking a stance. Only risk to the bottom line.

I question the sincerity but its grassroots and no one is looking for corpo sponsorship. They could anonymously donate if they want and its important to them.

Perhaps this community should be renamed…

🤦

protesting is one of the few “real” things left to us, it would be horrifying it that got commercialised too.

they actually do, but its more covertly than that. at least with things like the eco-protests trying to disrupt traffic, or public spaces this is to undermine the movement to turn people against the protestors and the movement itself. this is all done by the oil industry, they also fund initiatives like"reduicng your Carbon footprint" so they dont have to reduce thier emissions. i remember certain educational videos about animals where they were promoting these initiative they were called out as being “shells” for the oil companies, luckily they removed it after in future videos.

You think any corporate board is gonna voluntarily paint a target on their back like that?

Or: look at the currently unfolding ramifications of Anthropic telling the pentagon to piss up a rope when they tried to order Anthropic to remove all the guardrails from Claude.

That’s funny. They call it a protest but it looks like a mass therapy rally from here. Also, AFAIK Denmark and Thailand are both kingdoms and do just fine.