10 ms·

In general I agree, except perhaps "Disney can only win.". They can lose PR; enough that the company might consider this an overall loss. Their service is hosp

• shiroiushi 2y ago
  >They can lose PR; enough that the company might consider this an overall loss. When has that ever happened? I can't think of any time when a company lost enough PR to actually significantly affects its financials, much less put it out of business.
  • roshin 2y ago
    Bud light is a famous recent example. Of course, the company is large enough that it didn't make the company bankrupt, but it hurt them
    • collingreen 2y ago
      It hurts my heart that all the examples above of companies hurting people or lying have very few consequences but bud light took a brand hit because they paid a trans person.
      • kortilla 2y ago
        Not because they paid a trans person, but because they made them part of the marketing. A product mostly marketed to the very demographic that is transphobic. It’s not at all surprising this backfired. Companies only started putting gay couples in commercials regularly years after gay marriage was legalized nationally.
        • didiop 2y ago
          Did you see Mulvaney's portrayal of "girlhood" though? Incredibly, ridiculously sexist. Let's not forget that the backlash against him has been for a variety of reasons, and one of them is his blatant misogyny.
        • collingreen 2y ago
          Yeah I didn't say "I can't believe this happened!?" I just said it makes me feel bad about things.
  • Singletoned 2y ago
    Ratners is the famous example that springs to mind here in the UK.
  • noisy_boy 2y ago
    > I can't think of any time when a company lost enough PR to actually significantly affects its financials It just have to affect enough to offset the cost of the lawsuit (which probably won't be much because they probably do have plenty of in-house lawyers) + the estimated cost of future lawsuits that might come their way if they appear to be "soft" and/or set precedence.
    • Silhouette 2y ago
      They just made the front page of the BBC News website. I think we can safely assume that a lot of people are going to hear about this one. How many future lawsuits about allegedly killing someone by failing to properly take into account their medical conditions after repeated warnings are Disney going to face? If the answer is greater than zero then it seems they have bigger problems than whether they can move this particular legal action to arbitration.
  • Rinzler89 2y ago
    >When has that ever happened? I can't think of any time when a company lost enough PR to actually significantly affects its financials, much less put it out of business. Exactly. VW shortened the lifespan of millions of Europeans with their Diesel gate and their finances are still solid. Ikea and Oil companies destroy the environment all the time and saw no financial hit from the PR issues. Nike, Apple and other major manufacturers are known to have used sweatshop labor and also saw no financial consequences. Consumers just don't seem to care enough about the PR of $COMPANY as long as their contempt with how the $PRODUCT they bought works and serves them well.
    • cogman10 2y ago
      Nestle regularly uses slave and child labor. I don't pin this 100% on customers, because many people aren't informed and worse, it's often not just these single companies, it's all their major competitors doing exactly the same thing. The issue is a lack of regulation and enforcement. We can't trust major companies to be good actors because capitalism does not reward honest actors. This is one purposes of government, to make the cost of being a bad actor high enough that companies behave.
    • alt227 2y ago
      > VW shortened the lifespan of millions of Europeans Thats a bit of an over the top way of saying it!
      • sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago
        We could stand to do a bit more raising of the profile of the externalities of such events. The emissions regulations that VW was cheating to get around exist for the purpose of improving air quality. The improved air quality leads to less air quality induced health problems. Which in turn leads to longer, higher quality lives for people in Europe. VW wasn't going around and directly pouring vials of poison into people's food like some kind of cartoon villain. But they absolutely were intentionally lying about the emissions of their vehicles, and those emissions absolutely have impacts to human health.
  • alt227 2y ago
    Crowdstrike lost 50% of their business valuation in a week due to bad PR recently.
    • hangsi 2y ago
      Arguably Crowdstrike's loss was due to a flaw in their product rather than PR. Disney's product (though not their core, I would argue) allegedly killed this poor woman - however it is the lawyers' behaviour, not the death itself, that is an additional PR liability for Disney; death from an allergy is tragic, but could have potentially happened at any restaurant in the country. Only Disney (and a select few other large corps) could pull this particular bad act in defence. As an aside, the entire line of argument from Disney is an absurd legal fiction. No reasonable person reads terms and conditions, and so they should not be bound by the terms. I hold a weak hope that this case is bad PR for the practice as a whole that raises the profile of this injustice.
      • alt227 2y ago
        Disneys product did not kill this woman. Disney own the mall, where a resturant chain rented a unit from them. The mall is free to enter and does not require buying a ticket from Disney. The 3rd party resturant hired the staff, made the menu, cooked the food and served the guests. Nothing to do with Disney at all. The only part disney has in it is they published the restuarants menu on the malls website, which reads 'Allergen Free'. This is the basis for the entire lawsuit.
        • benterix 2y ago
          > The only part disney has in it is they published the restuarants menu on the malls website, which reads 'Allergen Free'. And this should be their line of defense, not "but you clicked on a trial of a streaming service 5 years ago".
          • alt227 2y ago
            The general consensus is that to point out how absurd the claim is, you need to make an equally absurd counterclaim.
  • alt227 2y ago
    Isnt Tesla taking a pretty big hit every time his lordship tweets something?
    • gkbrk 2y ago
      No? You're confusing short-term stock price fluctuations vs brand value and future sales. Almost no one is picking a non-Tesla car because of the CEOs unrelated tweets.
      • datadrivenangel 2y ago
        The musk factor is starting to hurt them. I have friends who have told me they'd like a tesla but won't buy one because of Musk. I don't think they can name the CEO or senior leadership of another car brand.
        • eric_cc 2y ago
          That speaks volumes about your friends.
          • Larrikin 2y ago
            That he doesn't hold stock in Tesla or other Musk companies and doesn't want to be associated with Musk because of his opinions?
          • scblock 2y ago
            Yes it says they are probably good people.
            • eric_cc 2y ago
              All we know is this: They virtue signal that they want a product but don’t buy it because they’ve been conditioned to dislike the company’s CEO. It’s likely that their tribe has all been conditioned in this way so the virtue signaling would be well received and elicit social approval. I don’t think that makes them good or bad people, per se. I’m not here to lay down a judgement. It is what it is.
  • 7thaccount 2y ago
    I think the Bud light controversy did impact their sales significantly for a good while.
• Sarkie 2y ago
  It was a 1 month trial. Not even using it. "Disney claims Piccolo reportedly agreed to this in 2019 when signing up for a one-month free trial of the streaming service on his PlayStation console."
  • wang_li 2y ago
    Contracts require an exchange of value. If I got a free trial I would argue they got nothing and so there is no agreement.
    • mauvehaus 2y ago
      On the contrary, it seems extremely valuable to Disney to be able to force all disputes into individual binding arbitration rather than having to go through the courts. On the third hand, it's debatable if anything on Disney+ is of any value either, so it could be argued that the deceased didn't get any value and isn't bound by the agreement. (Yes, yes, I know that's not what you mean, nor is it what "value" means in a legal sense. IANAL, obviously)
• kozinc 2y ago
  Ah no, their argument is because she signed up for a one-month free trial of Disney+ in 2019, she agreed to arbitration for her death in 2023. So by their metric it doesn't matter if you cancel, you're still bound to that if you visit Disney IRL.
  • darth_avocado 2y ago
    She didn’t even sign up. It was the husband who signed up.
• yreg 2y ago
  The widower asked for 50k, this negative PR is already worse for DIS than paying out the 50k. Both sides can lose.
  • bugtodiffer 2y ago
    How is it losing to invest 100K to fight off a 50K lawsuit? If they would lose easily, they'd get more lawsuits. They have to scare others off.
    • LadyCailin 2y ago
      If they keep killing people, I should hope they get more lawsuits!
    • yreg 2y ago
      You mean if they killed your wife you wouldn't sue now, because you remember that you have tried out Disney+ once? I don't think this scares anyone of suing Disney. If anything, it scares people away from visiting Disney restaurants and subscribing to Disney products.
  • dudeinjapan 2y ago
    But just think: if they pay this 50K, then the spouse of every person Disney kills is going to start asking for 50K.
    • mcherm 2y ago
      Wow... I guess that would be a great deal of money.
  • jawns 2y ago
    That $50K figure wasn't mentioned in the article above. Where did you see it? I'm surprised that the figure would be so low, both because wrongful death claims are usually 6- or 7-figure amounts, and also because she was a NYC doctor with much higher future earnings potential than the average person. Edit: I see in a previous article on wdwnt.com that "Piccolo is seeking damages in excess of $50,000 under the Florida Wrongful Death Act." That doesn't mean, though, that he's seeking only $50K. I believe it means that he only needs to disclose at this point that the damages he's seeking are at least $50K, but could be much higher.
• bugtodiffer 2y ago
  I would think Disney is too big. Not even 0.1% of all Disney fans will ever know.
  • Temporary_31337 2y ago
    A good portion of HN already knows. Disney+ is struggling as it is. Giving people one more reason not to sign up is not good marketing. Losing 0.1% market share in case of Disney is probably worth more than the whole lawsuit.
    • mcphage 2y ago
      > Disney+ is struggling as it is. Didn’t they just start turning a profit, a year ahead of schedule?
      • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        Is this financial outlook posted anywhere digestible (ie not investor reports). I find it wild that it is not profitable. Video streaming is not cheap, but at their scale, they can negotiate the best peering deals or setup edge boxes a la Netflix or YouTube. Then again, maybe it is their core audience which has a different usage pattern from adults. I might watch one show a night. A child might stream for 12 hours a day. Unless Disney went on a spending spree and bought a big number of new movies+shows to publish on the platform, I am surprised. Disney bought Hulu- they could piggy back off of all that existing infrastructure.
        • mcphage 2y ago
          > Is this financial outlook posted anywhere digestible (ie not investor reports). I... have no idea. > I find it wild that it is not profitable. The news was that it is profitable now, and sooner than expected. > Unless Disney went on a spending spree and bought a big number of new movies+shows to publish on the platform, I am surprised. They did—they've had a number of Disney+ originals. And the streaming rights for Bluey probably wasn't cheap, given its popularity (and iirc it alone is like 25% of their streaming traffic).
• moss2 2y ago
  Hoping that journalists pick up on cases like these and spread the word wide enough is... optimistic, to say the least. A much better solution is to build incentives into the legal system, like tgsovlerkhgsel suggested. The problem isn't that bad actors abuse the system, the problem is that the system allows bad actors to abuse it.
• mcherm 2y ago
  Yes, except this person DID cancel her Disney+. More accurately, she never signed up for it, merely ran a free trial for a month in 2019. So the only possible way to avoid this, if Disney's argument was upheld, would be to have never interacted with Disney at all in any way.
  • gambiting 2y ago
    >>. More accurately, she never signed up for it, merely ran a free trial for a month in 2019 It's actually not even that. The person who died had the free trial, and now Disney is being sued by her husband - and her husband has never had a Disney+ trial or any other service with such an agreement with them. So like the article says - Disney is trying to anforce an agreement that this person(the husband ) has never signed.
    • jawns 2y ago
      Your point is correct, but you've got it backward. It was the husband who signed up for the free trial and bought tickets to Epcot. Yet he is suing not on his own behalf, but on behalf of her estate, and she never entered into any such agreement. You can think of it this way: Disney wronged the woman who died. She is the one who is owed damages. But since she's dead, her estate is owed damages. Her husband is the administrator of her estate, and he is suing on its behalf. So whatever agreements he has entered into in his individual capacity are irrelevant. It would be like trying to force arbitration on someone because their lawyer had a Disney+ subscription. That doesn't mean that they themselves entered into an agreement with Disney.
      • gambiting 2y ago
        Ah. Totally got it wrong then, thanks for explaining :-)
        • jawns 2y ago
          [flagged]
• benterix 2y ago
  > "Cancel your Disney+ before visiting Disney IRL". And if you haven't, don't subscribe to this service as it can be used against you.