What if your friend bragged that she’d just bought a brand of jeans because she’d checked out the company’s practices and made sure they were ethical — no child labor, no polluting the environment by the manufacturer.
Maybe you’d thank her for the info, even be inspired to change your own buying habits.
But a study suggests a lot more of us would have an opposite reaction: “Boy,” we’d think, “that friend is ‘preachy’ and ‘less fashionable.’ ”
The study, which will be published in the July edition of the Journal of Consumer Psychology but is already available online, builds on earlier research suggesting that most shoppers experience a kind of ethical dissonance: If we’re actually told that a specific product was produced in an unethical way, we won’t want to buy it. Yet given the choice, most of us would rather not know the backstory. We won’t make the effort to, say, download an app or check out a website that could give us ethical ratings of manufacturers. And the reason we avoid this extra checking-up is at least partly that we’re unconsciously afraid of being upset by what we’ll discover.
“Anger is one of the emotions people most often feel if they find out a company is doing something unethical,” says Rebecca Reczek, a professor of marketing at the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. “So choosing not to find out is a way to avoid that kind of negative emotion.“
This. Makes. So. Much. Sense. –Vesta
This article blithely ignores the fact that any clothing that is cheap enough for the poor to afford is going to be produced unethically.
“Ethical” clothing is expensive as hell, and of course students who barely scrape buy on minimum wage under a mountain of college debt aren’t going to be buying from the all natural handmade local etsy designer who buys all her fabric from yet another all natural handmade local etsy business because they don’t have $90 to burn on pajamas.
The entire concept of “the ethical consumer” is morally dubious.
It essentially claims that if multinational corporations violates human rights in order to produce their products, this is the consumer’s fault, for buying those products. Never mind that the bulk of those consumers are themselves being paid below a living wage to work for those same multinational corporations.
Ethical consumerism is meaningless in a society that has no middle class (and the US has already become such a society). The percentage of the population that actually has the monetary power to choose ethically produced products is vanishingly small – too small to affect the market as a whole and affect real change in the world.
Put simply – a handful of moneyed individuals choosing to buy ethically produced clothing isn’t going to stop The Gap from building factories with poor safety standards or stop Victoria’s Secret from using prison slave labor.
We don’t need ethical consumers. We need ethical voters and lawmakers to enact laws for fair labor and environmentally conscious manufacturing standards – laws that will force corporations to behave ethically.
Thoughtfulfangirling 