The Informed Consumer

These days I've had the opportunity to take a really interesting course at school: Sustainable Business Practices.  Now, this may seem like a very normal course for someone to take - but for me it's something special because as a hospitality student we don't have much opportunity to study things beyond specifically hotels.  After working on a very interesting project of analysing the corporate responsibility efforts of different brands from Disney to Patagonia all the way to South West Airlines, it made me think of how many businesses are actually participating in CSR movements.

This entire blog is based off of corporate social responsibility - used in a personal manner, yet I have never thought that the solutions to the problems we are facing is using this personal power in conjunction with companies CSR programs.  Let me explain my train of thought, basically I believe if people and businesses could both work together to improve corporate social responsibilty many of the problems of polluting and social injustices in the world would start to alleviate - not neccesarily go away but at least improve.  However, my mistake was in understanding the role of the business and the role of the person.  Personally we can all make efforts to lower our carbon footprint and treat others the way we would like to be treated.  However, this makes a very small impact (but it is still important - so continue doing what you're doing to better the world).  What businesses are doing though, is making CSR changes to their business based on the markets demands.  They are not making 100% of the difference they could if they solely reduced their carbon footprint out of sheer good will; and that makes sense because corporations act in accordance to the market and what makes business sense.

This is where I had been going wrong.  I thought that my efforts were mine alone and that the small actions would add up sooner or later.  While this might be true, a bigger affect I might have had was being lost through all of my irrisponsible purchases.  Of course when I went to the store I was choosing the cheapest item - who wouldn't?  The project made me realize something though, not all businesses were made the same.  If you were to compare Patagonia with any other type of cheap clothing manufacturer there is a huge difference between social policies protecting workers to environmental policies trying to use sustainable resources.  Its hard to imagine that just one purchase at a responsible store versus a cheap vendor would make a large difference, just as using less shower water might not make an extremely large difference in water consumption.  However, this is not true.

When you support a responsible business, these businesses are being supported by your money to continue doing the right thing.  This can affect many many people all the way to secondary suppliers of these businesses.  Of course, one purchase is small but it has two effects built into one.  First, it is giving money to those businesses that are acting responsibly, but secondly, it takes away money that would have gone to potentially irrisponsible businesses.  This positively impacts the market two fold because it allows responsibilty to flourish all the while encouraging those who are irrisponsible to change to be responsible making it a market demand.

So, I am trying to find ways to find which businesses are responsible and which are not.  I would like to (as much as possible) find a way to be an informed consumer.  At the moment the best way I have found is to see which companies are being transparent.  A good method of rating this is by looking at a businesses G4 report lead by the Global Reporting Initiative.  It will detail everything from their human rights support all the way to their environmental policies hiding nothing in between such as supply chain forced labor and child labor practicies and numbers.  Although these are quite bulky reports, they are quite useful when trying to make a decision on who to use as a supplier, who to invest in, and now who to spend your money on.

I know its a long shot to evaluate every single purchase made, so thats why I'm proposing a sort of comprimise.  Anytime we are going to make a rather large purchase, look first, be informed, and choose the more responsible company to support with your money.  The impact can make a bigger difference than our other efforts, and its rather simple in comparison.  No one is perfect and can monitor each and every transaction, but that one could make the difference between a company deciding to implement a more comprehensive CSR stragey - which can affect thousands upon thousands of people down the line.

Let me know what you think about being an informed consumer? Do you think it has such a large effect, and if so which are your favorite responsible businesses?

What exactly are you spending? Money? Think again...

The other night I was watching a very interesting video recommended by a friend called Human Extended Version Volume 1. Although this is a very powerful video and had many important messages and questions for us as human beings, there was one line that struck me the hardest.  Near the end of the video there was a man who really got me thinking about life and society in itself.  He was speaking generally about the economy but the human condition in itself.  He ever so thoughtfully posed the question: What exactly is money itself?  A seemingly basic question when you were brought up in a society who never questioned its origin - however I wanted to dive deeper.

He explained that money is not just a device we use to purchase materials, it was not simply a valuable stone, coin, or gold backed piece of paper.  In fact he realized that money was nothing more than a quantity of time.  This takes the idea of money back to the source - work.  When you work you are spending time helping others (bosses, managers, customers), and in compensation for your time they give you something called money that you can exchange with others who share their time to help you.  It seems simple, and not very important as it is just the "middle man" so to speak.  That basically by buying certain products we are giving parts of our lives away to obtain them.

Take for instance if I was working a minimum wage job at around 8 dollars an hour.  When I needed to buy a new shirt which on average from a typical shop is around 20 dollars - that means this shirt is worth around 3.8 hours of my life.  How much did you spend on your closet?  Time is not something you can earn or get back like money, so why do we treat employees as if they are only worth 2 or 3 shirts per day?

Using time to buy products makes me ask why certain people's time is worth much more than others.  If this is how we are to value each other in society how is it that someone who scrubs the floor all day is worth exponentially less than the boss who manages all of the housekeepers?  I do understand that certain positions need more or less experience, education, and skill to obtain and thus should be compensated greater amounts, but how many times more is too much?

When it comes to being socially responsible I want to ensure equality among those who spend their lives working for what seems to be very unequal wages and thus also must unequally spend their lives continually working for the basics instead of the luxuries.  For instance in a relatively moderate company such as a hotel the general manager typically makes over 2 times more than their hourly employees such as front desk workers or bellboys.  If you were to take this to a larger extreme such as a large shopping outlet like JCPenny, the CEO was making more than 1795 times more money than their workers for the same amount of time (David Herris Gershon, retrieved from  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/27/1251041/-JC-Penney-CEO-Makes-1-795-More-Than-Workers-Largest-Gap-in-U-S-as-Company-Loses-73-Value).

Overall, to be socially responsible one must think of what money really represents before deciding what employees deserve to earn.  Of course different jobs require different amounts of compensation but the effects of a wage 1000 times higher than employees can send not only the wrong message to the customers but it undervalues the lives of the employees since to earn this money they are giving up their time.  Awareness is always the start to making changes.