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Aug. 10th, 2005 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosToday, in Things That Are Really Cool:
Buy Blue on your iPod. (Not that I have an iPod, but if I did, I could totally use this.)
There's a longstanding "you know you're a San Franciscan when..." joke that ends "you boycott so many products you have to keep a list on your refrigerator or you'll forget." For me, that didn't used to be true: most of what I boycotted was easy to remember, and you tend to buy blue when you buy local -- amazon.com's red, but I didn't shop there even before I knew that because I shy away from Huge Companies that put my Favorite Local Stores out of business, so I shop at powells.com which, hey, happens to be blue.
As big companies started buying up organic producers, it got harder to remember -- Atria/Philip Morris owns Kraft which owns Boca Burgers and Balance Bars, General Mills owns Cascadian Farms (the bums -- I used to buy their frozen fruits) and Muir Glen, Coke owns Odwalla, Dannon owns Stonyfield (ditto the bums, because it's taken me ages to find a comparable local organic), and Kellogg's owns Morningstar and Kashi. Still, buying local rarely lets you down.
And I didn't find buyblue.org helpful when it started, because there really wasn't much there that I didn't already know -- it listed very few companies, and most of them weren't surprising. Starbucks, with its good labor relations? Blue. Shell Oil and Walmart? Red. Fancy that.
The list's gotten much, much bigger now, though. They've researched whole new categories of products, and while most of the seriously-blue companies don't surprise me, some of the reds do. For example: California Pizza Kitchen. Nordstrom. Urban Outfitters. Dell. Krispy Kreme. Remembering labor relations standards at places I rarely go is much harder, so I find this a really cool idea. Out and about and want to go to a drugstore? Look it up, and you'll find that you should opt for CVS over Rite Aid or Longs. Neato.
Buy Blue on your iPod. (Not that I have an iPod, but if I did, I could totally use this.)
There's a longstanding "you know you're a San Franciscan when..." joke that ends "you boycott so many products you have to keep a list on your refrigerator or you'll forget." For me, that didn't used to be true: most of what I boycotted was easy to remember, and you tend to buy blue when you buy local -- amazon.com's red, but I didn't shop there even before I knew that because I shy away from Huge Companies that put my Favorite Local Stores out of business, so I shop at powells.com which, hey, happens to be blue.
As big companies started buying up organic producers, it got harder to remember -- Atria/Philip Morris owns Kraft which owns Boca Burgers and Balance Bars, General Mills owns Cascadian Farms (the bums -- I used to buy their frozen fruits) and Muir Glen, Coke owns Odwalla, Dannon owns Stonyfield (ditto the bums, because it's taken me ages to find a comparable local organic), and Kellogg's owns Morningstar and Kashi. Still, buying local rarely lets you down.
And I didn't find buyblue.org helpful when it started, because there really wasn't much there that I didn't already know -- it listed very few companies, and most of them weren't surprising. Starbucks, with its good labor relations? Blue. Shell Oil and Walmart? Red. Fancy that.
The list's gotten much, much bigger now, though. They've researched whole new categories of products, and while most of the seriously-blue companies don't surprise me, some of the reds do. For example: California Pizza Kitchen. Nordstrom. Urban Outfitters. Dell. Krispy Kreme. Remembering labor relations standards at places I rarely go is much harder, so I find this a really cool idea. Out and about and want to go to a drugstore? Look it up, and you'll find that you should opt for CVS over Rite Aid or Longs. Neato.
