The Myth Of The Ethical Shopper

Sweatshops a big issue in today’s society, even though their existence can sometimes stay hidden from the public’s eye. A famous author named Berry states, “ most of us get all the things we need by buying them and most of us know only vaguely, if at all, where those things came from; and most of us know not at all what damage is involved in their production. We are almost entirely dependent on an economy of which we are almost entirely ignorant.” The majority of people in the US have no idea where the clothes they are purchasing are actually coming from. Most people would not support the exploitation of their own race of people. If they were able to see and come to realization about what is actually happening they would have a much different change of heart.

Malcolm Gladwell’s piece, “The Science of Shopping”, causes his audience to fear retail anthropologists such as Paco Underhill. On the surface, Gladwell appears to write a short documentary of sorts about the manipulation of businesses and stores. Venturing deeper into the story provides the reader with vision of the importance businesses place on their layouts and strategies. Gladwell continues to assure his point that consumers are not mindlessly obeying what retailors want them to do. Store owners are required to accommodate to how their customers behave, and what their target market wants. Gladwell refers to significant moments with Underhill by directly quoting Paco. He also vividly describes different aspects of Paco’s practice.

A famous writer for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has written an article, “The Science of Shopping”, which is based on Paco Underhill’s study of retail anthropology. The intention of a retail store is obvious- that is to attract customers and convince them to perchance as much as they can. There is so much knowledge that we can study, such that how the environment affects people’s thinking. These are tiny details that we don’t usually think about. The reason of how Paco Underhill success is because he notices these details. Details determine success or failure. Paco Undnerhill—a talent and passion environmental psychologist, provides us a new point of view of the science of displaying products,

Malcolm Gladwell is currently a non-fiction writer for The New Yorker. After college, he took a journalism position in Indiana and later took a position in Washington. In 1996, he moved to New York, where he is today. He has written five books and each has been on the New York Times best seller list (Famous Authors). In his first year of working as a journalist for The New Yorker, he wrote, “The Science of Shopping.” In this piece, Gladwell objectively evaluates Paco Underhill’s research within the business industry. Underhill “would have from a hundred to five hundred pages and pages of carefully annotated tracking sheets and anywhere from a hundred to five hundred hours of films” for each experiment that he conducts (99). With Underhill’s determination and research, and Gladwell’s journalistic qualities, this report changes the way anyone views shopping.

It is impossible to beat a cheap price. In today’s world, finding a sought after item at a dirt cheap price is one the main motivation American’s get in the car and battle the craziness in the mall. And as the basic American human beings that we are, it is never possible for us to be complacent with the amount of stuff we currently have. Eventually, we will come across a friend that has the next must have item that will cause us to run to our local mall and purchase a similar item at the lowest price possible. With all that said, it is no wonder why the industry of fast fashion has taken off over the past decade. Felipe Caro and Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, researchers for UCLA’s school of supply chain coordination, define fast fashion as “a business model that combines four elements: (i) fashionable clothes mostly for consumers under 40; (ii) affordable prices in the mid-to-low range; (iii) quick response; and (iv) frequent assortment changes”. Retailers like H&M, Forever 21, Target, and Wal-Mart have been able to take this business model and make a fortune. But while all these quick trends and cheap prices are great for the consumer, its cost on the foreign worker and the environment does not go uncovered. In the book Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline, she presents many arguments supporting the claim that fast fashion is unethical based on

On April 24, 2013, NewYorkTimes journalist Jim Yardley reported on the collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story factory complex in the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, which claimed the lives of 1,100 people. A 400-page report of the incident places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the building's owner, Sohel Rana, along with the owners of the building's five garment factories, who now face possible charges of murder, along with accusations of “ignoring safety warnings and locking exit doors,” while the Bangladeshi government continues to receive harsh criticism for its lax enforcement of labor safety standards in the country's billion-dollar clothing manufacturing industry (“Sweatshop Labor”). The garment industry in Bangladesh is one of the world's leading exporters of clothing, second only to China, with more than 5,000 garment factories employing an excess of 3 million workers, producing merchandise for top brand retailers in the United States and Europe (Yardley; “Sweatshop Labor”). Workers in these factories endure long hours and unsafe working conditions for wages so low parents must send their children to work instead of school so that they have enough to eat. The tragedy of Rana Plaza brings to the forefront the true cost of things; is it worth 1,100 lives to save a few dollars on a shirt or a pair of jeans?

Everyday thousands of retail stores throughout the United States open up their stores in the morning for the sole purpose of attracting customers and selling them merchandise. For this assignment I decided to do a store analysis of the retail giant Wal-Mart. To begin with I will evaluate the store layout and design. Next I will explain the visual merchandising techniques used that Wal-Mart uses. Finally I will discuss the problems and recommendations that I have for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has continually been a leader in the retail industry, and it all starts with the layout of the store.

Bangladesh is one of the world 's most densely populated countries, with its people crammed into a delta of rivers that empties into the Bay of Bengal (BBC, 2015). Poverty is widespread, where many people suffer from malnutrition, especially in the rural areas. The structural failure of the Rana Plaza collapse, an eight-story commercial building, occurred on 24 April 2013 in the Savar Upazila of Dhaka, Bangladesh. This resulted in 1,137 confirmed dead at Rana Plaza, and over a year later 200 are still missing (Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, 2015). The issue is an ethical issue which has affected many lives in Bangladesh and resulted in western civilisation demanding change. The ethical issue involves around a Bangladesh man Sohel Rana, and western clothing companies, specifically the company it manufactured for, Canadian fashion brand Joe Fresh (Forbes, 2013). The building, Rana Plaza, was owned by Sohel Rana, whom illegally extended the six-storey building, into a nine-storey factory complex.

The spatial design of a store may seem like something unimportant, but in it carries the many secrets that get customers coming back. Paco Underhill is a retail anthropologist who’s many strategies to get shoppers to buy more is laid out in Malcom Gladwell’s article The Science Of Shopping. The way in which we walk into a store, look at items, and more are all analyzed to create a perfect shopping experience. By putting Paco’s strategies to use, as well as some of their own, my local Aldi in Hackensack, creates an effective shopping experience.

Karen Coates really exploits the relationship between corporations and garment manufactures in her article. It really opens people’s eyes, it shows people who may not know, they could be wearing clothes that was made with the hands of a struggling worker. In her essay she shows us the values of the four social actors. One of them being the workers. The workers are the most abused. They have little to no say in what they do, they are controlled and tormented every single day for a little days pay. The workers struggle to stay up long hours, they work in hard conditions and when they finally get to go home they are not living in the best of situations. Most workers pay can’t support a large family who has kids and medical expenses. The workers

Question 5- Jeffcott proposes that rather than simply making more conscious consumption choices, consumers should advocate for the exploited sweatshop workers by demanding school boards, governments, and universities to constitute policies for clothing companies to provide information regarding their factories and to demonstrate whether or not they are attempting to mitigate the work conditions of these factories.

In the past, Primark has overcome such potential market failures. After the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where some of Primark’s product were produced and collapse of which caused more than 1,100 deaths, many individual’s boycotted Primark products opting for a more ethical wardrobe (The Guardian 2014).

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is the world 's largest retail enterprise, with total revenue of $421.8 billion and a net income of $16.4 billion in 2011. 1 It is also the world 's largest employer, with 2.1 million employees worldwide in 2010 2, not including workers hired by its providers. In my opinion, Wal-Mart provides a clear illustration through which to look at how many multinational companies (MNCs) take part in an illegal and unethical behavior. They use their bargaining power and market control to pressure countries to overlook environmental degradation and violation of national labor laws. They dictate expected pricing for products, particularly through imports from overseas countries. Labor is fulfilled mostly by underage and underpaid employees. In the United States, since 2005, Wal-Mart has paid about $1 billion in damages to U.S. employees in six different cases related to unpaid work. 3 Furthermore, Wal-Mart opposes any form of collective action, even when employees are not seeking unionization, but simply more respect. 4 The fact that Wal-Mart opposes unions exist. The company has a long history of fighting them, to the point of closing stores after employees organize. Managers have been instructed to talk to their teams about why unions are so unwanted in their business. Overseas, the company was involved in a series of scandals, including multiple cases of bribery. In April 2012, The New York Times published a story that

You have just been asked to donate money to an anonymous person every day; you will never see their face and know their name. You likely hold a closer bond with your favorite childhood Disney character than you do to them. And so, you reply with a polite, “no, sorry” because you reason that it is not in your financial interest to dole out your hard-earned salary to strangers. Yet, despite the logic behind your refusal to make daily donations to an anonymous person, you are nonetheless being economically irrational when you shop ethically. This is because the premium you pay for ethical goods and services is equivalent to the daily donation that you would make as it also benefits a random, unacquainted person at the expense of your savings. It is apparent in ethical consumerism that economic rationality is overruled by ethics. This begs the question: how do ethics supersede rational economic behavior in consumer choices in ethical consumerism?

For this essay I chose to focus on my favorite shirt, a black crop top with daisies, from Target. Like many articles of clothing, this shirt was made in China, most likely in exploitative conditions by a low wage worker. I bought this shirt secondhand for $5 and this shirt is no longer available on Target’s website. However, by looking at similar shirts from the same brand, it seems likely that this shirt would have cost the original purchaser anywhere from $15-$20. On their corporate website, Target states that they are focused on retaining “ethical standards” and that they “only work with vendors and suppliers who share [their] commitment.” They even post a list of their factories, organized by country, city, and factory name. This list is 78 pages long, and in just China alone, Target lists 1337 factories which translates to around 45% of the total number of factories.