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I'd argue that's laziness though. Sure it may be unusual to research every purchase, but how often does one really buy jeans? Once every year tops? And it's not like the values change that often, so you spend an hour once every five years, and you can actually properly vote with your dollars. We need to expect more from people. It's not the government's job to take care of them in every facet of their damn lives.
Your values don't change, but a company you like gets a new CEO, etc. And with all the research in the world you still don't know exactly. A lot of these clothing companies intentionally offload production to random companies in Asia and let them handle all the ugly business of actually making the stuff. This is so the name on the label can claim innocence when, say, an unsafe factory collapses and kills 1100 people.
And this is fairly straightforward.
How often do you buy food? How do you know where that meat is coming from for sure, or that the animal wasn't mistreated on the way to the plate? A bunch of states in the Midwest have passed laws that make it illegal to go in and record premises under "false pretenses" - certainly a First Amendment violation, but it is what is happening (TN's governor to his credit just vetoed one of these laws). It's kind of hard to make ethical decisions on food sources when companies work hard to hide that information.
I spend long periods of time researching my jean purchases. I researched raw denim, and various brands for a month or so before deciding which pair to get.Quote:
Originally Posted by Diff-chan
I understand what you're saying though.
P.S. I look good.
That's all true, and I understand that no one can be 100% informed, but people can't stick their head in the sand and be 0% either. There are lots of products that are relatively easy to follow the supply chain. And, hell, even if that's too much work, even the ultimate product seller, the AT&T, Sony, Apple, Hasbro, Toyota, etc. level, has practices that may or may not align with someone's values. That's better than nothing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Diff-chan
edit: Just read Gaming Discussion and look how many people bitch about something and then throw money at it anyway.
Objection.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yoshi
It is better than nothing but it's still not enough. Ultimately the owners of companies need to be held accountable for the behaviors of the corporations. That's what a corporate governance system is about, and ours is not functional.
I think we can all agree on that. It's like healthcare. We can't agree on how to fix it, but we know it doesn't work as-is.
Yoshi is a funny fellow. Corporations hate the yoshi type capitalist. They do not want informed buyers. They do not want Josh to research his jeans. They want buyers to give money to the flashest ad campaign or buy the jeans in the closest store with the fanciest label ad highest mark up. They want millions of easily influenced impulse purchases.
Corps even know they think like this. This is a big part of why American entertainment has been childized, girlyized, and teenized. Those groups are the easiest to get impulse purchases from, thus all advertising and entertainment are corralled to that end. Adult men and most adult women are hard to trick out of their money. 14 year old girls, not so much.
No doubt, and that's my point that the public can actually keep them honest to a significant extent with a little effort. I've posted before that as a general rule I'll support privately owned companies over publicly traded ones. That's painting with very broad strokes, but if you don't want to do any more research than that, you're still doing more good than harm.