RSSCategory: Money
Women and Cosmetic Advertising
February 14, 2010
Nevermind if you use the Paula’s Choice products. I ask women why they don’t subscribe to Beautypedia. They see the reviews as just another marketing voice, just Paula’s opinion. Maybe it takes training in science to understand the incomparable value of independent examination based on sound research. All science asks for is SOUND proof.
Read moreRead “Ultimate Showdown at Ulta”
November 11, 2009
Daynah Burnett, a Paula’s Choice employee recounts her tale of embarrassment and insult at an Ulta store. Can this store be this dumb?
Read moreGifts From Real People 1
October 23, 2009
Here we go again. Every magazine is showing gift suggestions. There are some lovely ideas but if you live in Canada, if you live in a small town, and/or if you can’t spend $50 on each person (nevermind the $250 bar set), what do real people give? What do real people want?
Read moreAttention Clothing Retailers : At 12Blueprints
September 26, 2009
As marketers, when we encounter new ways of doing things, we have 2 choices.
Read moreWomen As Clients
April 27, 2009
The way the guys move you from the information delivery to the buy decision is by scaring you. Or at least making you uncomfortable about something you don’t know or don’t have that they’ve persuaded you that you need. Or they bulldoze you with their experience and self-confidence, neither of which necessarily translates to ability.
Women are somehow convinced that there are these really smart white guys in business offices out there who know the future. Actually, the really smart white guys are the ones who f.cked the whole thing up so royally. They were doing 1 + 1 = -4, or 5, or 3,000,000. or something. Didn’t the woman who noticed get herself fired for her brains? Maybe it’s just as well the whole thing crashed when it did. Unsustainable flow dynamics are doomed. It’s a wonder it didn’t take more of us with it.
You know what’s going to happen. You know the guy thing – if it’s his idea, it’s a great idea. Otherwise, it sucks out loud. Then the idea migrates around the back of his head, crawls in the trap door, and he bleats it out his own mouth. In a year, he’ll say it was his idea. In 10 years, the men will say they knew it was coming all along and tried to tell the rest of us but we wouldn’t listen.
Women want to think that guys get money. It’s so much easier to transfer all the financial diagnostics and authorities to them. Men have dominated money for so long that women are used to it. If something goes wrong, women don’t have to take any blame, which they abhor anyway. So it all works out for everyone.
If you, as a woman, speak to women clients in language they understand, they think you know nothing. Talk over their heads and they think you’re a genius. I see this in medicine all the time. The guy either rambles off a pile of jargon or as much as says “Leave it to me, little lady. I’ll take care of everything” and the women are sold. They gaze up at the doctor, (the doctor expects no less), they haven’t a foggy what the guy is talking about, but who cares? He’s taking care of it. He said he was, it must be so. I can do that too but my conscience doesn’t feel good.
Whether in medicine or in stock predictions, there exists a high degree of day-to-day uncertainty in the simplest, most seemingly mundane decisions. Women express this with more honesty. Clients don’t want to hear it, or they misinterpret it. They hear “it could be this or it could be that” as vague and lacking in knowledge, when it is quite the contrary. Thoughtful uncertainty is reality. The idea that Symptom Y + Symptom Z = Disease X is false. It will lead to shortcuts in thinking that will cause regret.
The fact is that there are no really smart people anywhere who know more than you do. You get it, or easily could, if it were explained in a language you speak. Every industry has created some secret little language to describe secret operations they carry out in rooms decorated to look important. You are not dumber than anyone and nobody is any smarter than you. Never let anyone think for you, even if it seems easier. Your decision-making ability might be less informed but given the facts, it is not less astute, especially where the future is concerned. Nobody has a clue about that.
So how does a woman sell to women in a way she feels is ethical?
You don’t want to be so good at selling that you’re bringing in people who aren’t ready to buy or people who aren’t ready for you.
If you over-empower women with information, they figure they don’t need you.
Putting yourself on sale doesn’t work for women or men. They expect cheap work for cheap money. Undervalue yourself and you’re screwed.
Do you take on male behaviors? Certainly, releasing disempowering female behaviors is essential. The one single thing the guys have over us is self-esteem. There’s something to be said for believing you’re special and that nothing is ever your fault. After all, we are what we say we are.
Do you publicize your exclusivity? Do you make yourself a little unavailable? Actually, I think that does work. The best way to get noticed is to walk the other way. Those who follow really want you.
Take a moment to contemplate, if you will, the difference between rejection and selection.
-->Women want to think that guys get money. It’s so much easier to transfer all the financial diagnostics and authorities to them. Men have dominated money for so long that women are used to it. If something goes wrong, women don’t have to take any blame, which they abhor anyway. So it all works out for everyone.
Read moreWhen You Know You’re Rich
April 9, 2009
For her 15th birthday, my daughter wanted to sponsor a child with World Vision. This would be the same child whose favorite activity is watching Ice Road Truckers with her father.
Having more than enough
Barira is a 10 year old girl from Niger who sits on our fridge and looks out. It’s somehow ironic that she adorns the food repository. Her father farms as does my husband so she connected with all of us. He can’t feed his family in a good year and nor can Canadian farmers, but of course the scale is completely different. We know that.
We wanted to send a birthday gift. It had to be flat for mailing and not extravagant. My daughter wanted a musical singing birthday card, which I feared would scare the pants off the child. We find ourselves at the Dollar Store trying to find something not too extravagant.
We are TOO rich to find a gift for this little girl. Everything seems wasteful and excessively adorned. For us it’s disposable, for her unimaginably frivolous. In the cheapest store there is, where we could afford anything, our wealth is still too great to find an appropriate gift. Your whole frame of reference changes when you know what “too rich” actually feels like.
Money and the Law of Attraction
I’ve been reading Jerry and Esther Hicks’s recent Money and the Law of Attraction : Learning to Attract Wealth, Health, and Happiness. The book is as good as any of the previous and doesn’t rehash the old material. There are a lot of new ideas here, presented in their most practical and possible style.
I really like this stuff because it helps me get through the day with a real undercurrent of openness and joy. People who know me are ROTFL right now. Well, I’ll have you know I really am joyful. If I look more intense than joyous, it’s because I’m part Winter.
I’ve learned to find the best things about what I do, even the things I like less (except producing meals day after day). I’ve learned that we all create our own reality. I don’t have to feel bad for others who aren’t getting what they want because they can make different choices anytime they want to. What’s happening to them isn’t happening to me because I didn’t make their choices. I know nobody can block me or even slow me down from getting what I want because nobody controls the Universe – as a result, I am never irritated by the behavior of others. That’s quite a cathartic milestone right there.
How others have failed me is never important, only how I’ve failed me. There is never a need to get involved in the actions of others, only in my reaction to them. I do have control of my character, every aspect of it. Everything I’ve sent out there, good and bad, is on a trajectory aimed at my face. Energy stays equal so what goes out comes back in kind.
In this clip from the Abraham-Hicks site’s video clips, watch the 11th clip from the top on the right side. The video title is the same as the book, an excerpt from the DVD. Listen to how she (Abraham) answers the question at the end.
When does the creating start?
Though I thank Jerry and Esther for modeling such a powerful and easy way to learn calmness and happiness, I’ve run up against a question I can’t answer. This is it : I can’t think of anything I’ve manifested or attracted. However my life changed, it changed because I stuck my claws out there and made a few attempts to drag something in and finally got a hook that stuck. It never just came with “ease” (and by ease, I do not mean absence of effort; more like, you just looked up one day and there it was, like it had been there all along).
It didn’t come with struggle or worry either. I love doing it. I love the ride and my river moves fast because there’s a lot I want. I’m reading the money book to attract more of money to stay in the raft. Money is an energy (infinite) not a resource (finite). It’s flowing in the streets, kind of like guns. Just because you don’t have one doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of them. How many guns I have doesn’t affect how many you can have.
I live wealth like it’s happened. I look at my house, I see a castle. I used to worry that I wouldn’t be able to afford to educate my kids, but a friend said “Who do you know that didn’t go to University because they couldn’t afford it?”. I stopped worrying.
I quite get what they mean by Leading Edge. My toes are touching the line. I’m not impatient. Our needs are more than met and that’s the only story I tell. I’ve found that thing in life that I would do even if I weren’t paid. We CAN make things just by thinking about them, I’m convinced of it.
The question is not how to get more money, though to realize my dream will take more than I have. It’s how to have it appear by thought, not action. Nothing is getting created that I didn’t build. No doors are presenting themselves, closed or open, that I didn’t go out and ferret out. How will I manifest money if I can’t manifest anything else?
Was the manifestation that I chose these actions and not those actions? You could say that I manifested everything I live. Yes, right thinking brings right actions. There is just no feeling of letting it happen. I made it happen. And, anyone who has manifested money can measure it by the ways of our physical world. I have yet to manifest a cent.
Realizing a downstream dream
My Easter will be spent becoming a Color Analyst. If women could see themselves as their most effective, beautiful, powerful best, I’d be happy. That’s the vision I have of them when I meet them. That’s what I want to help them do – and learn to resist the marketing onslaught that makes us think age is more ugly, more abnormal, and more weak than youth. Aging, or more precisely “anti-aging”, is a marketing phenomenon and nothing else.
My speaking tour will be called You : Gorgeous And Fearless. Everything will turn out fine, but when does the manifesting/creating begin???
So, Abraham, from a purely intellectual perspective, what are we supposed to think next? The bank account is going down but I can ignore it with ease. I could sell the piano on eBay but that feels upstream so I won’t do it. Will it have to reach a crisis before I manifest something? Does the room have to be completely empty before the new furniture can fit? I don’t mind waiting but you might take the line “as early as tomorrow” out of your teachings.
Is this like dieting? You can start tomorrow but you won’t look different for a month. Until the new eating kicks in, you will look like your old eating patterns. In the same sense, until the new thinking starts to shift the Universe, life is still bringing you the rewards of your old thinking ways.
Keep your day job. And your fat pants.
-->Though I thank Jerry and Esther for modeling such a powerful and easy way to learn happiness, I’ve run up against a question I can’t answer. This is it : I can’t think of anything I’ve manifested or attracted. However my life changed, it changed because I stuck my claws out there and made a few attempts to drag something in and finally got a hook that stuck.
Read moreThe Male Business Model
March 13, 2009
It often feels like we’re going at it alone. We dream of another life, or at least being able to opt out of the one we have temporarily.
My body cooks up funny problems to take me out of circulation for a few days. It knows when I need to sign out of my own life for a little while and it grounds me with some strange unimportant abnormality.
I bring it on myself by the Law of Attraction. I think “I wouldn’t mind having a minor ailment. How wonderful that I could have 2 or 3 sick days and no one would expect me go to work. I could just stay home, my favorite thing.”
And sure enough, just like you get everything if you think about it enough, I get this. This is why my problems are always gynecological. Men are not empathethic creatures where pain is concerned, but they will back off with this kind of pain. If I had a simple gash in my leg, the men around me would feel I should be at work because they would be. Lots to prove.
The male business model’s paradigm is always PUSH.
And if that works, what do you do next?
And if it doesn’t work, what do you do?
Same answer.
PUSH HARDER.
That mindset believes that if you haven’t put in a 60 hour work week, you haven’t been worthwhile, a “hard-worker” worthy of respect from your kind and yourself. Interesting that these guys still easily carve out time on the golf course.
This is the male version of abundance. It’s the thinking of a certain upbringing (small towns), a certain a generation (wartime), and the attitude about life that results (life is a competition because the amount of good stuff out there is limited; if you win, someone else loses so you better beat everyone else to the cash and prizes). The female mindset of abundance is the hamster-on-a-wheel life that women set up for themselves. In both cases, busy-ness and exertion can fool you into thinking that changes are taking place.
And then after they’re done pushing harder, they’re busy wanting MORE. There’s no line in the sand that says to them ‘enough’. They’ll risk what they already have. In fact, they’ll put it up on the auction block and sacrifice it altogether and allow it to be destroyed to get MORE. The financial meltdown was an example on a grander scale of the male business model needing to forever prove itself with MORE.
The male world sees it as a big deal to leave work at 2 to pick up a child. In the female version, where everything is available and possible, it’s very natural. The family is who we do it all for. There’s no way we’ll do anything that would jeopardize that. Men say they do everything for the family too. But it’s not true. They do it for themselves, for their sense of self-worth and to fulfill their idea of what a MAN does.
Men have taught us that one income at a time must be pivotal and protected. They put all these impediments on us to sustain that because it suits them very well. They find they get less interruptions and more eagerness to be accommodated. Women swallow the small seed of fear and resign themselves to “Whatever would we become without that income??”
Allowing that belief is how we’ve been kept down and kept each other down. We will never make that system work or play naturally within its boundaries. You look at your job for the things you really love and they’re not there. You feel scared and hassled with no control.
We can see the posturing and the bluffing, the bluster and the swagger, for nobody’s benefit but their own. We don’t belong. We know how artificial it all is. This is how they assure themselves that they’re doing something important. Some of them have figured it out – that busy doesn’t mean productive or successful.
They don’t mean badly. They’re just following a pattern that we’ve all been taught. Nobody wants to reinvent a system that, on the surface, seems to work for everyone. Or looked like it did for our parents. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe we can want and have more than our mothers.
All we can do is to stop playing. It’s so deeply embedded in our culture that the only ones who can see it are those women who consciously decide to pull away and make up something new. Who realize that it can be whatever you see it as being.
The more I pull away, the more bizarre the thing looks. It becomes ever clearer that money can be soft-earned and not at the expense of what we already have, including family, a huge non-monetary asset, and health, which is the most valuable commodity that exists.
You don’t have to live in the male world. That net that restricts all your limbs can be gone. Let the wind move to your back. You don’t have to want people who don’t want you. Don’t think of it as being rejected. Better to see it as a wonderful stream of selection that brings you the people with whom you can thrive. The other kind can screen themselves out.
The male world, by the very way it’s set up, holds women away. They can’t see it and we can’t either, but the fit isn’t right. John Fowles said “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. It is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.” We’ve become too afraid to laugh.
There is no single right answer where all the outcomes will be joyful. There are more choices than we admit, fewer consequences, and even less risk.
PS – In searching for the Fowles quote, I looked first at Aldous Huxley because I was certain he said those words. I was wrong, but he did say these : “Maybe this planet is another planet’s hell.” Depressing but funny, and freakishly out-of-the-box, consistent with much of what he said and wrote.
-->It often feels like we’re going at it alone. We dream of another life, or at least being able to opt out of the one we have temporarily.
The male solution is always to Push. And then to PUSH HARDER.
That mindset believes that if you haven’t put in a 60 hour work week, you haven’t been worthwhile, a “hard-worker” worthy of respect from your kind and yourself. Interesting that these guys still easily carve out time on the golf course.
Book Review : Secrets of Six-Figure Women
March 1, 2009
Like many women, understanding any aspect of finance, wealth, or investment by staring at charts and graphs gets me nowhere. Women don’t learn that way. It makes our eyes glaze over, causing the male financial advisor across the table to conclude that we’re bored or too dumb to get it.
Presenting information to us in the way that is effectively presented to men does not work. Bring on the female financial advisors who can explain in pictures, or with stories, and we’ll get it. Women care about money. We may attach odd values to it, but we especially want to look after those we love. We don’t want to be in the dark, but there is a linguistic issue here.
Armed with knowledge and understanding, women will become very powerful in dealing with money (and probably bigger risk-takers than the men). In fact, the more knowledge women have about a topic, the better and more confident their decision-making. Think about this : is the same true for men? I think it’s the reverse, actually.
Barbara Stanny’s book, Secrets of Six-Figure Women: Surprising Strategies To Up Your Earnings And Change Your Life, first published in 2002, does not contain any stock charts. It’s not even about how to invest or manage your money. It enters the picture sooner than that, with how to make the money in the first place by creating an inner change. Fulfillment and empowerment, with very practical and realistic advice on how to get there, are the biggest landmarks on the road to financial success.
Stanny is the daughter of Richard Bloch, one of the founders of H&R Block. Her first husband lost her trust fund through bad investments, leaving her with huge bills and no knowledge of finance. She was forced to face up to a common trait of inherited wealth, namely big insecurity about her ability to support herself. Her journey is recorded in her first book Prince Charming Isn’t Coming : How Women Get Smart About Money , and this one.
Barbara Stanny
For Secrets Of Six Figure Women, Stanny began by interviewing hundreds of women in many income brackets, searching for traits that were common among the high (and low) earners. If you take a group of equally bright, equally educated, very capable women, why is it that some of them will always struggle financially while other will earn ever-rising amounts? Is there a shared set of characteristics that can be found repeatedly among women earning more than $250,000 per year?
Turns out that there are at least 7. And since they’re not personality traits, but rather ways of guiding decision-making, they can be learned.
This is really about finding that thing that you were born to do with love and passion, whether you are paid or not, and from there gaining the self-esteem to charge what you’re worth. Lessons in uncovering your own set of underlying values, in not being a victim, in finding gratitude for obstacles, and so many of the thoughts that resonate strongly with women, are found here.
There are chapters on facing fear and declaring intention, about pulling away the safety net, and about negotiating on your own behalf. The information comes to you through stories about how other women cope with these issues, how they succeeded and how they failed, and what they learned from it.
There is some great advice to be found on speaking up for yourself. This is probably the spot where women are weakest. The biggest reason that men make more money for the same job is this : THEY ASK for it. Until you learn to take yourself seriously, nobody else will either. Learning to do this can be extremely intimidating for girls and for women. Most of us need all the help we can get at using our elbows.
Chapter 11 is entitled Claiming Our Power. With some thoughts about how women lost it in the first place, and continue to give it up to keep the peace instead of compete, and finishing with some beautifully motivating words about taking up your own space to the fullest, Stanny has written a book that any woman who is thinking about her life will find great meaning in. You’ll read many sections that you’ll feel were written for you personally. What would it be like to be at the center of your world and have all the rest spin around you for a change, instead of whirling around the periphery of the lives of everybody else all the time?
This is entirely action-oriented. She knows that failure, rejection, debt, insecurity, and mortgage bills exist but small change is still change. What she really says is this : Women hold themselves back by believing that avoiding stress and responsibility is pro-family. I do that. I know more women who choose this avenue on purpose for this reason. I’m beginning to see that Big doesn’t look like I think it does. Big is where the choices are.
So many of us can feel another woman living inside us that the world has never seen. We keep her buried because we don’t have time to become her, or think about what she’s like, and besides, we’re a little afraid of her. We feel the things she could be, but she’s so far away from the day-to-day role we play that we don’t know where to start. Whether you become a high-earner or not, Secrets Of Six-Figure Women will help you discover Your Deeper Self.
Have a look at Barbara’s blog. She posts about once a month, but it is worth reading. This is money and life advice written for the way women understand and learn. My favorite entry, at the end of this page, is entitled “Fear Got You Stuck?” In it is a line I’ve repeated to myself a thousand times :
What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
-->
Presenting information to us in the way that is effectively presented to men does not work. Bring on the female financial advisors who can explain in pictures, or with stories, and we’ll get it. Women care about money. We may attach odd values to it, but we especially want to look after those we love. We don’t want to be in the dark, but there is a linguistic issue here.
Read moreHow Wall Street Fell And How To Fix It
January 17, 2009
Do you understand the recent turmoil? I lose interest when I read about it because I don’t understand most of what I read. I want to be able to talk about it because everyone else is. I don’t want to be accusatory or misinformed so I do more listening. Where can you learn the facts without being bored or confused?
When possibility and bankers meet
What if someone wrote it as a story about people? No graphs, no jargon (or not so much that the meaning is mired in it), not too many %. As a story about human behavior, it is nothing short of fascinating and not even surprising. The more you read, the wilder the story becomes. This debacle as fiction could never have been plausible.
Some people saw it coming. In fact they took out bets that it would happen. Who were they? How did they know? What alarms did they raise and who chose to ignore them? The most easily readable obituary of the financial meltdown is the article “The End” for the December 08 issue of Portfolio magazine.
Michael Lewis
Lewis begins at the beginning of the now-wreckage. It is the buildup towards the realization that collapse had to happen. The system was obviously, clearly, incontestably doomed. There was no other possible outcome.
When the end began
Actually, the pot was simmering long before the mortgage fiasco. It began 30 years ago. In Lewis’ 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, in the same story-telling vein, he describes Wall Street of the 80s. Again funnier and more far-fetched than most fiction, this is Lewis’ own autobiography in a tale about people, greed, and permission. Addicted to the wild risk ride, seeing themselves as indestructible, these were the rulers in the game of finding every legislative loophole possible to amass indecent fortunes by risking other people’s money.
There are good reviews here and here, if you want to get the gist of it.
What they did with the money
In the January 09 New York Times article “The End Of The Financial World As We Know It”, written by Lewis and David Einhorn, you’re brought up to date with what went on, what’s going on, and what they did with the money they were given. The role that politicians played in the background is explained. It becomes obvious that what they’re doing to fix things is as idiotic and doomed to fail as the scientific neglect that got them there in the first place.
How can so many people in charge of so much be so deluded ? Who would give $700 billion to someone with a gambling addiction without changing the rules of the game? How can single individuals still have so much authority?
Understanding the financial industry is not important. You don’t need to. It ‘s just a story about people posturing, bluffing, and ultimately hiding weakness. Showdowns are the name of this game, Old West style, gun-slingers trying to protect themselves and secure their glory. Wall Street is just human nature on a grander scale.
How to really fix it
The second part of the article above is “How To Repair A Broken Financial World”.
The warnings were always there. Reasonable solutions are offered but the choice seems to be made not to heed them. There are other ways out of this than just throwing more money into the pit that sucked it all up in the first place. The system that so mismanaged itself will have to propped up artificially to maintain some sort of status quo and prevent a complete unravelling. I hope something more is happening behind the scenes.
We all have a sense of the inexcusability. Bankers moved from invincibility through denial to protection. Can this lesson tame the insatiable greed? Of course not. Humans are humans. You don’t give a bully more attention. His reward system has to be taken away.
The gears of the political and financial machines will have to grind in sync to straighten this out. The legal loopholes will have to be closed. This second article presents forward-looking means of preventing a repetition because the weaknesses of human beings are foreseen and contained. It is the only thing that will really work.
-->I lose interest when I read about it because I don’t understand most of what I read.
What if someone wrote it as a story about people? No graphs, no jargon (or not so much that the meaning is mired in it), not too many %. As a story about human behavior, it is nothing short of fascinating and not even surprising. The more you read, the wilder the story becomes. This debacle as fiction could never have been plausible.
Mall To Mall Travels in America
January 14, 2009
We’ve returned from the road trip from Ontario to PEI. Bill says we should just put a fifth wheel on the roof of the minivan and drag a semi trailer. Throw on a CB antenna, and we can converse with the big rigs. If the monster purple suitcase flies off the roof and hits a truck, it will knock it off the road. Then the big rigs will be mad at us.
We crossed into the US at Buffalo, stayed a night in Albany, NY, a night in Portland , ME, and a night in Freeport, ME , getting to Charlottetown on the 4th day. It sure was a better drive than Northern Quebec. If it storms, I’ll take Albany over Riviere-du-Loup anyday.
The whole family together for 4 days in a little van. Dunkin Donuts, chips, fries, what’s next ? My hair flipped up and I’m headed to NASCAR. I found it interesting how overheated my body felt for that 3 weeks of eating so much or so badly, like my personal global warming bioassay. Do you suppose pollution makes our individual furnaces run hotter, just like the planet’s? Eating that way also creates a disturbing amount of garbage.
If there’s a recession, someone should tell the Americans. Malls were as full as ever. The lineup at the checkouts was long. Can a recession can be prevented just by the collective power of millions of people not believing in it? Or is the reality just beginning to settle in? Maybe all those people were not buying, or maybe they won’t be buying now. I think we’re a little insulated from the situation in Canada.
We’re walking through L.L. Bean. Bill saw an item of clothing he liked but refused to buy because it was made in China. He had noticed the same thing about the Lexus cars parked in the center isle of a mall the day before. The sticker in the window said “% Canadian or American content, zero”.
He noticed where an item was made within 15 seconds. Put me in front of those cars or clothes for a full minute and I bet I couldn’t tell you where they were manufactured. That information doesn’t jump out at me.
I see that Canada and the US can trade “fairly” because a dollar is worth a dollar and the wages and standard of living are the same.
I can understand that there can be no such thing as fair trade with a country like Mexico or China where people work for $5 a day while we work for $15 an hour. Companies are sending all the manufacturing there but they want all the consumption to stay here. It can’t happen. If we don’t buy our own stuff, nobody here will have money to spend on anything, regardless of where it’s made.
But the spirit of America is stronger than ever. We want to make the right purchasing choice. It just needs to be more obvious. Put a big US flag or a picture of Obama right on the front of American-made items and I bet more people would add that consideration to decide their action.
If I had $20 left at the end of the week and Made in the USA or Made in Canada or Made in China was more obvious, I’d be swayed by that. I may not always like or choose what America makes but it would pressure North America to make what its citizens want.
Have you watched Mr. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth? No person over the age of 10 should miss it. It will change your life. Hopefully, it will change all of our lives. In it, he explains that emission standards for cars made in the US are so low that they could not be driven in China. If that is still true, then US automakers don’t deserve to have their vehicles bought. The technology is in place. This is a political low point. Consumers do, and should, use more information than where something is made when they decide what to buy because some issues are bigger than all of us.
For many products, this just needs to be easier. Every consumer demographic should be able, within 15 seconds, to say where a product is made to factor it into a buy decision. It would be easy to say that consumers should be more conscious of the issue and actively find the information like Bill does. I don’t think that’s realistic. I’ll be too distracted by all the other things I’m noticing. We want to do well but we’re lazy. I’m lazy.
Imagine if Sephora had all the animal-tested stuff on one wall and the cruelty-free products on the opposite wall, clearly marked. I bet the tested products would be gone in a year. We’re strongly driven to spend our last $20 on what we want but we have enough conscience to support the right side more often than we do if we don’t have to go out of our way too much.
It will be interesting to see how retail does in the next 4 months. Mobil is putting its gas grades R to L, unlike the conventional L for cheapest and R for costliest. Someone not paying attention will select the most expensive. Maybe they’ve always done that, but now, we’re noticing and resenting. Diesel costs more and it’s a by-product of gas. Gas in Canada costs much more than in the US. … and the gas companies are not screwing us?
Some will go under. Some will try to sting us a little deeper.
Thanks to Sandra for the link to Sundance Catalog. There are some beautiful things here, “Cleverly Cute Shoes” , “Ultra Cool Boots”, items for the home, jewelry (Circle Of Friends earrings, be still my heart!), and clothing. The Outlet, always my second stop at a new website (after About Us), is there. The prices are entirely competitive. From the About Us page, everything appears to have been crafted by artists across the US.
-->Every consumer demographic should be able, within 15 seconds, to say where a product is made to factor it into a buy decision. It would be easy to say that consumers should be more conscious of the issue and actively find the information. I don’t think that’s realistic. I’ll be too distracted by all the other things I’m noticing. We want to do well but we’re lazy. I’m lazy.
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A Greener Tea
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