Shop With Your Heart Too
Is it important to agree with the ethics of those running the businesses that you patronize? Recently, the Wal-Mart chain raised the ire of women’s health advocates when it announced that its 2,000-plus pharmacies nationwide will not be carrying Preven, a new form of the so-called “morning after” birth control pill. Though company representatives say the decision is not related to morality concerns, its management has in the past banned the sale of some kinds of music, handguns and men’s magazines on moral grounds. RACHEL FISCHER spoke with a local business expert.
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NANCY KURLAND
Assistant professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business; expert on corporate ethics
The power of the customer is very strong, so those who claim that it will make no economic difference for one individual to avoid a company are just plain wrong. Personally, I tend to stay away from companies whose values I disagree with.
It’s irresponsible for a public company to express strong political or moral opinions that reflect the philosophies of only the top shareholders. Take Wal-Mart: The store is inexpensive. A lot of people may not be able to afford to shop anywhere else. If a product was not available at Wal-Mart, perhaps these patrons would not even try to look for it elsewhere.
The power that Wal-Mart has to influence the media with its advertising or to make products available or not available is vast. So when they don’t carry a product like Preven--knowing that they may be the only place where many customers can or will shop--they are trampling on the consumer. And that’s a big, big problem for me.
Once, I gave my graduate students a project in which they had to trace the lineage of a bottle of ketchup and the ecological impact of that one bottle. Who planted the tomatoes for the ketchup? What pesticides were used? What about the materials to make the bottle? You start to see that the creation of one product can unleash a chain of events that can have vast consequences.
That’s why it’s so important to know the effect the product is having before you buy it. You can research your favorite companies in magazines such as Business Ethics and on the Internet. It will take a bit of your time, but you should absolutely do this.
I’m not saying it won’t be an enormous task: Ecological irresponsibility and the use of sweatshop labor, for example, are widespread in the world of big business. On the other hand, there are companies, such as Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and Patagonia, that have made it known that they are liberal and environment-friendly. And there’s the famous case from a few years back in which Levi Strauss & Co. learned that foreign factories with which they had contracts were using child labor. Since these children needed to earn money to help support their families, Levi ended up paying the kids to go to school.
Unfortunately, most companies wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to do that. In the 1990s, it does seem as if companies are more aware of having some social responsibility, but whether that’s really changed their behavior, I don’t know.
