Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Conscious Shopping

I am a bleeding-heart liberal (my father's term). This should put all of this in context.

About five years ago, I embarked on a little experiment: to not buy anything made in China for six months. This was a reaction to the news at the time about our Chinese trade deficit. I can't begin to describe how annoying it is to need to buy a desktop calculator and not being able to find a single one not made in China.

Essentially, the experiment failed because it's impossible to buy nothing made in China. But what grew out of the experiment was the decision to shop consciously. This meant more than trying to avoid buying something made in China. It meant choosing a small, locally owned shop over a big chain store, because they are at a disadvantage in the market. It meant buying things in person rather than over the Internet, because that would mean I would pay sales tax, which goes toward providing state services I depend on, like public transit. Also, buying something in the store that I bicycled to reduces the carbon load of the purchase.

Recently, I read in Mother Jones about  how Internet mega-retailers like Amazon and Walmart use third party logistics providers to do all the actual order filling and shipping. And the workers they hire work in sweatshop conditions:

Go and read the whole article: I Was A Warehouse Wage Slave

I am distressed that this sort of employment is even legal in the US, and that because of the third-party temp-labor hiring, companies like Amazon aren't held liable for the working conditions.

This has really soured me on shopping at Amazon, or any other online retailer that I can find using similar third-party logistics for order filling. But today, I found a new wrinkle in my conscious shopping. For years, I've used the "wish list" function of Amazon to keep track of books I'd like to read, although I often just get them from the library. And yet, there are a number of people who actually, sweetly, buy me books and things from that list... from Amazon. Am I encouraging them to use Amazon if I keep my wish list there?