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Last update - 02:31 20/06/2008 To buy or not to buy, that is the ethical dilemma By Tahel Frosh, TheMarker Tags: Economy, Israel The small grocery store in central Tel Aviv was the perfect venue for T., who religiously shops at small businesses rather than mass-market chains. The brothers who run and operate the grocery are "really nice," she says, and are even spearheading the battle against allowing the chains Tiv Taam and AM:PM to stay open on Shabbat. Well, they have good reason - the fact that the chains operate on Saturdays is one of the reasons that small neighborhood grocers are having such a hard time. So T. was dismayed to enter her friendly neighborhood grocery one day and see porn magazines on the newspaper stand. Advertisement "As a feminist, it really bothered me," she says. "It was a collision of values in which I believe. On the one hand, I believe that porn is bad for women. But on the other hand, I think it's important to shop in small stores that are part of the neighborhood's fabric." She deliberated whether to bring up the issue with the really nice brothers but elected not to, because she was too embarrassed. She also stopped shopping there. That is a relatively uncomplicated example of the considerations that today's "ethical shopper" has to take into account. What is ethical consumerism, anyway? You could say, any commercial or consumer act involving a political, ideological or ethical consideration. Shoppers today may consider values such as ecology, health, worker rights ("blue ideology"), animal rights and fair trade. Which is all very high-minded. Many a study shows that a lot of people support values such as eliminating child labor and preserving the environment. The research by Prof. Jacob Hornick of the Business Administration school and Nurit Guttman of the Department of Communications at Tel Aviv University certainly does. The problem is implementing these precious values on a day-to-day basis: Then it turns out that most Israeli consumers allow entirely different values, such as price and convenience, to supersede, Hornick says. A TGI survey published two months ago shows that despite the media attention to green issues, only 7.3% of the population could care less about ecological issues, and would strive to choose products that are relatively less harmful to the environment. The rest run the range from passive awareness to unaware. The United States and Europe have plenty of data on consumer culture. But the only marketing studies conducted in Israel relate narrowly to green issues. In comparison, last year the Financial Times published surveys conducted in five leading economies (Britain, the U.S., Spain, Germany and France) about the broader issue of ethical consumerism. Dafna Rubinstein is a doctoral student at the Van Leer Institute who studies fair trade, which means, products made by people who earn a livable wage. She found that in Israel, out of the small group that actually have some sort of consumer ideology, only about 60% would actually strive to buy fair-trade products. Do you believe? Why does the mere thought of "ethical consumerism" look like it's giving up without a battle in the Holy Land? That's anybody's guess, but one possibility is that the sheer flood of information, academic and advertising alike, has created confusion. You can't tell what's what, what's true and what's hyperbole, and reach conclusions. Marine biologist Uri Oren, who specializes in environmental branding at the Shalmor-Avnon-Amichay advertising agency, accuses scientists of being partly responsible for the fogginess that characterizes the information in the public domain. Academics have been aware of the world's environmental problems for 50 years, he says, but their language is hectoring and unclear. Even if we pick and choose our information, unless we personally know the people making the food sold in the stores, or the people picking the tomatoes, or have patted the cow producing the milk, we have to rely on what we're told about the production process and the quality of the products. And we don't always believe what we're told, do we. The Financial Times found, in that same survey, that most people don't believe what companies tell them, and believe that corporate ethics have deteriorated in the last five years. This mistrustful attitude toward Big Business, or small business for that matter, is well deserved. A study by The Economist a couple of months ago, on the world's biggest companies, found that 75% had turned greenish, setting up whole teams, departments and think-tanks, chiefly because they knew "green branding" would be good for their image. In other words, a genuine change of heart seems to be rare. More interestingly, the study found that most actually implemented only about a quarter of their environmental commitments. Call it greenwashing their image. Style rather than substance. Pesticide-soaked 'bio-strawberries' "To be a better and smarter consumer, you have to know more," says Uri Oren. But will the consumer take the trouble? Oren points out that despite the Israeli consumer's suspicion toward big bodies, there is no grass-roots or other movement to set up watchdogs, as there are in England and the United States. Take the "bio-strawberries," Oren says  they were touted as "organic," but they were actually saturated in pesticides. If he were to set up an organic foods company, he says, it would be easy for him to cut corners because the public doesn't investigate. The consumer public is considered to uneducated, unconsolidated, apathetic and therefore unlikely to boycott, and tame. Supervision of information and companies could resolve some consumer problems, but there's no easy answer there. Dafna Rubinstein, for example, says that she spoke with the Standards Institute, which decided to develop an ethical code for companies, and with Maala, which is developing ethical codes. Motorola torpedoed the Standards Institute initiative, she claims. The Standards Institute wanted to include worker rights but Motorola was worried about unionization. Motorola openly admitted that it didn't want its employees to unionize, Rubinstein says, and the proposed standard remained a draft, no more. Ethics in business remained nothing more than contribution by its workers to the community, which is entirely not the point, she says. Talia Aharoni, manager of Maala, told Rubinstein that sections the companies hadn't felt comfortable with had been extracted from the code. One might think that health-food stores would be a rare bastion of ethical products. One might be wrong. Just look at the plastic bags into which they load your goodies. Also, the big health-food chains aren't in a hurry to teach. Rubinstein says that efforts to introduce fair-trade olive oil to the big chains Eden Market and Teva Castel failed. The oil was made by Palestinians. Eden Market said outright that it didn't want to buy Palestinian products and Teva Castel was vaguer, but the upshot was the same. Eden Market commented, "It is a little strange to comment on an incident that happened a year ago, involving a buyer not authorized to respond in the company's name." Motorola commented that it rejects the statements made in this article. Teva Castel's comment could not be obtained as of press time. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Sarkozy's promise 'France will never compromise Israel's security' Israel's agenda Is an Israeli strike on Iran still on the government's agenda?   1.   You should have spoke up 04:41  |  Neil Golan 20/06/08   2.   No etchical dilemma - do not buy if open on Shabbat 10:56  |  Binyamin Dissen 22/06/08   3.   Corporate and Consumer Responsibility in Judaism 22:57  |  Tamar 22/06/08   4.   Reject religious despotism 15:10  |  Ulf 23/06/08

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