Buying Better: The Impossible Challenge of Ethical Shopping
By Markus Brauck, Dietmar Hawranek,Simone Salden and Bernhard Zand
Many consumers are intimidated by calls to buy smartly and sustainably. Now a handful of activists and big companies are trying to make ethical purchasing go mainstream — but they’ll have to change the way we think.
One day, Claudia Langer found herself in the midst of a spending spree. Like a former smoker lighting up after a long break, she bought out half a toy store — garish plastic toys, Lego bricks, Barbie dolls. For the past two years, she had been making considered, exceptionally sensible and sustainable consumer choices. She hadn’t flown in a plane, and she had only purchased wooden, eco-friendly toys. “Joyless, colorless stuff that was totally uninspiring,” she says today.
Langer is the founder of a romantically named online portal for ethical consumerism called Utopia. She had told her customers they could help save the planet with their consumer choices, but that day in the toy store, frustration set in and triggered a crisis of confidence. “For years I’d been telling myself that sacrificing exotic travel made me happy,” she says. “But it wasn’t true. In fact I’m energized by trips abroad, and it wasn’t as if my sacrifice had any effect on climate change.”
Langer is furiously chopping fruit and texting as she talks in the conference room at the Utopia office in Munich. She’s an impatient woman, energetic even in her disappointment. At times, her resentment is almost comical — like when she vents her exasperation with the Volkswagen Passat BlueMotion she bought. “What a downer,” she says. “The biggest rip-off of my life.”
She’d spent weeks researching cars, determined to make the right ethical choice. It ended up being a traumatic experience. “I deliberately bought the car with the lowest carbon emissions in its category, but I was duped by the advertising.” Buying it was an act of sheer self-denial, she says now, and a total mistake. “My children laughed at me. The second you pick up a bit of speed, you start guzzling gas.”
Anyone who has ever tried making environmentally friendly or socially and politically responsible consumer choices knows how tempting is can be to eat, buy and waste whatever you’d like or to buy whatever is cheapest. It can be freeing to do so without a guilty conscience, without feeling like you are destroying the planet, without worrying about the consequences.
And that day in the toy store, Claudia Langer wasn’t just giving in to a whim. She was admitting defeat, turning her back on the idea that ethical consumerism alone could change the world and that her business could revolutionize Germans’ consumer behavior.
Waiting for Critical Mass
It’s not that Utopia wasn’t a success: The website was admired and practical, and had a steadily growing consumer base, but Langer thought it was all taking much too long. She felt like she was preaching to the converted, the 15 percent of the population who didn’t need to be convinced to buy ethically. She wanted to reach the mainstream, but the mainstream wasn’t interested.
“My utopian vision was that consumer pressure on businesses and corporate pressure on politics could change the world,” says Langer. “But as long as there isn’t a critical mass of consumers harnessing their power, we won’t be in a position to create a better future for our children.”