5 ms·

Make it easy for me to vote with my wallet

32 points by jal278 13y ago

a3n 13y ago
"Someone needs to make a mint-like financial site that tells me when I am spending money on companies with policies that disagree with my morality or personal politics; I don’t have time to research when companies do horrible things, please help me be a better person anyways." All of them. HTH.
- jal278 13y ago
  I'd like to at least minimize evil per dollar
  - zarify 13y ago
    Considering we've been trending toward the megacorp world for quite some time now you're probably better off growing/farming your own food and not worrying about the rest. That or starting your own pharma company for ulcer medication and antidepressants. That said, it'd be an interesting project, even if the metrics would be a complete nightmare; am I more pro- environmental regulation than I am pro- gun control? How do you rate Company X lobbying for Bill Y on a scale of Things I Don't Like?. I suppose you'd have to go down a machine learning path for individuals, maybe starting with presenting alternatives for whatever thing you're interested in spending money on, a la the plain English terms of service site that was set up a year or two ago (that I've lost the URL for[1]) and building a profile from there. Realistically though, I think the whole exercise would just depress anyone who took it on. [1]It was indeed http://tosdr.org/ http://tosdr.org/ - Thanks :) re-bookmarked!
    - eurleif 13y ago
      >a la the plain English terms of service site that was set up a year or two ago (that I've lost the URL for) I believe you're referring to: http://tosdr.org/ http://tosdr.org/
    - com2kid 13y ago
      > That said, it'd be an interesting project, even if the metrics would be a complete nightmare; am I more pro- environmental regulation than I am pro- gun control? How do you rate Company X lobbying for Bill Y on a scale of Things I Don't Like?. I suppose you'd have to go down a machine learning path for individuals, maybe starting with presenting alternatives for whatever thing you're interested in spending money on, a la the plain English terms of service site that was set up a year or two ago (that I've lost the URL for) and building a profile from there. It is even more complicated than that. What about some company that uses a Chinese factory that is known to employ workers under 18? Evil[1] right? Well sure, unless you dig in to the numbers and find out that the company mandates no under age workers in their portion of the factory. [1] See discussion below, definitions of evil vary!
      - count 13y ago
        What's wrong with workers under 18? I had 3 different jobs before I turned 18. Unskilled factory labor seems like a great fit for the teenage crowd. Hell, in the US, there isn't even a minimum age limit for farm labor[1], and the minimum age for non-farm labor is 14, with anybody over 16 being allowed to work unlimited/full-time hours[2]. [1]http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agriculturalemployment.htm http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agriculturalemployme... [2]http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agerequirements.htm http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agerequirements.htm
        com2kid 13y ago
        > What's wrong with workers under 18? I had 3 different jobs before I turned 18. Unskilled factory labor seems like a great fit for the teenage crowd. A lot of people disagree with it and want to spend their money accordingly. Many of these issues are subjective, I fully agree that it often isn't black and white.
        sliverstorm 13y ago
        Right, so what you need is a slider. What's the cutoff age. 18? 16? 12? Of course, that's a distraction. I worked for the government when I was twelve, but I only worked an hour or two a week.
    - jal278 13y ago
      Maybe a more tractable approach would just be to have some kind of wiki that would just track articles for given companies along certain categories (e.g. the article on Walmart would have pro's/con's for the worker's rights category). Anything that centralizes this kind of information even if it doesn't completely parse out the good/bad would be nice
- perlpimp 13y ago
  Perhaps there needs be a some sort of inforgraphics based reporting system that will enable one to perform social communicating with slices of people that do also buy said product - to form groups that can tag together to form a pseudo political force with a specific task in mind. Kinda like what corporations were meant to do when they were drafted into law (in US). It can be used to build political counterweight to large corporations that want to flout law and regulatory guidances by way of subsidizing interests in the body of the government that performs such duties. As per every endeavour the devil is in the details like page rank, colors used for graphs and general consumability of said service.
tvst 13y ago
The problem with voting with your wallet is that the richer you are, the more times you can "vote". I'd rather vote with my actual vote.
- jhart3333 13y ago
  Lots of people voting with a few dollars each adds up and will get their attention.
  - zeckalpha 13y ago
    Will it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmtm9CSLjaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmtm9CSLjaQ
    - jal278 13y ago
      Even if there is a great disparity in wealth, if the company in question depends upon selling products to the poor or middle-class, then this sort of strategy might still be effective
    - msandford 13y ago
      Wealth != purchasing power. The 1% might have 80% of the nation's wealth tied up but the middle class and the poor have all the purchasing power. So long as they're intent on saving a buck whatever the cost, corporations will pander to them just as hard as they possibly can. No matter the human toll. Walmart treats their employees poorly because that's what has to happen for Walmart to work like it does, and just wow does everyone love it. Walmart could go bankrupt in a year if everyone just started shopping at Target. But nobody does because it's not their problem.
- jal278 13y ago
  That's a true statement; but many companies that do terrible things make all their money not from the rich but from the middle-class and poor
chailatte 13y ago
that's easy. minimize your purchases with mega corporations. buy more from small businesses. btw, if your bank is jp morgan chase citibank bank of america hsbc you should be ashamed of yourself.
- sp332 13y ago
  That's hard to do without researching various umbrella corporations, sponsorships, partnerships, and investment deals. (edit) I meant this part: minimize your purchases with mega corporations. buy more from small businesses.
  - jhart3333 13y ago
    Not really hard. Just move your money to a local bank or credit union. Easy. Edit: Not really hard to do that part either. Just do your grocery shopping at a locally owned market or farmers market instead of a nationwide chain. No need to avoid the national chains completely. Just move in that direction.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- gyardley 13y ago
  Right. I should be ashamed of myself for putting my money with a bank large enough to have a chance of getting its own way vs. the federal government when push comes to shove. Instead, I should put my money with a small credit union with no money managers capable of getting me a decent return and so little clout when the proverbial shit hits the fan it'll be left to be roadkill. What could possibly go wrong?
  - msandford 13y ago
    What return? The interest rates available these days are appalling. At this URL (after being prompted for a zip code) I was able to see a 120 month CD that yields 0.9% with anything less than 42 months being 0.15% yield. During the last meltdown we saw that the FDIC made everyone whole. Did you even hear about the NCUA bailing people out? I didn't. I tend to think that's because credit unions did OK during the crisis as most of them tend to keep their loans on their books and as a result, didn't get swept up in the diciest loans in the bubble. As a result I would suggest that perhaps the parent is correct and that credit unions are the way to go. Or is there some other kind of proverbial shit hitting the fan that you're referring to? In my mind if TSHTF, any money you have in the bank is gone; worthless or irretrievable. What's the scenario where it's bad enough you want/need the clout of a mega-bank but where the banking system and our government aren't both totally effed but a credit union is?
jhart3333 13y ago
This site is my quick and dirty start: http://dontbuytheircrap.com http://dontbuytheircrap.com But I haven't gotten around to building the tool yet. The idea is to have a mobile friendly web app that leverages social networking to help with this very problem. I didn't think there would be an opportunity for monetization. Maybe I was wrong.
rogerbinns 13y ago
I tried and failed to do this ten years ago. The basic premise was you scanned a product barcode at a store and would get useful information back. Americans almost entirely care about price so the first module I wrote scraped Amazon and gave back the Amazon price. I wanted any number of modules to give you other information relevant to your needs. Some examples: - Environmental (eg the furniture you just scanned was made from rainforest) - Nationalism (eg if you call support it will be answered by someone in a different country) - Manufacturer (eg pointing out another store carries all 5 colours instead of the 1 you see here) - Reviews (eg metacritic scores) - Social views (eg gay marriage) I was hoping that price would be the least useful piece of information, and provide a way for sources of information (eg Greenpeace) to be connected to consumers who wanted to know about that for the product right in front of them. Today you are still stuck with price, and in some cases reviews, and we are all the poorer for it.
- mercuryrising 13y ago
  I think the general attitude towards 'lowest price' in America is what could eventually bring the downfall of America (as we know it). I like thinking about the movement of the 'American system' as an evolution. Back in the day, all the stores were owned by a local person. You go to this store, that's Bob's store, he knows all about the fruit he gets, it's always the best, he goes over to the farmer's field and makes sure he gets the cream of the crop. From here we have a huge population of stores (like neurons competing / cooperating to be heard). All over America, people are employed by running their own stores. Until one day, when a super store comes on the scene. It sells things cheaper than the other stores, and it has a bigger selection. Bob doesn't work there, but they have pretty much the same produce. Maybe the high school kid working there doesn't know the farmer where the fruit came from, but that's not so bad, I didn't know that farmer when I bought the fruit at Bob's. Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, our world is shifted. Instead of going to the store, knowing the owner, striking up a conversation, getting the latest scoop on the happenings of the neighborhood, we go to the store to accomplish a task. This is efficiency, right? There's another shift too, and it's a personal shift (that might not happen to anyone). I go to Bob's store, and I see he mismarked his apples, they should be a $1 a piece, but they're $0.10 a piece. I don't want to rip Bob off, I know him, he's a great guy. I say "Hey Bob, is this right?" He says "Oh no, that's a mistake, sorry about that." That's alright, you have to make a living and I don't want to make you lose money by purchasing something from you. I go to a big box - they mispriced something. Maybe I can slip this by them, and the cashier won't know the real price... I mean, there's no real people to hurt, right? I'm not ripping anyone in particular off, just the company, which is a bunch of people, and no single one of them is going to be worse off because I purchase a mispriced item. Any way that you can represent that this purchase is not part of the 'race to the bottom of the barrel', that's great. All the efficiency in the world will not make a place that's happy for people. Efficiency is inhumanity.
crm416 13y ago
I'm not sure how well-supported this product has been (the website itself seems down, if that's any indicator), but https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buy-back-your-vote/id535014326?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buy-back-your-vote/id5350143... was done as a project last year in one of my university courses.
cupcake-unicorn 13y ago
How would this work for purchase, say, at a Grocery Store? The mom and pop grocer's down the road may have no evil corporate affiliation, but the makers of the junk food they're selling - that's a different story. It's so hard to pick out every little piece. As a parallel, I am a vegan, and I just have to accept that no matter how hard I try - even if I did have an app - I'm going to be using or ingesting animal products at some point. An app just can't take into account every little piece of the puzzle.
- jal278 13y ago
  The problem is definitely nuanced; shopping at a mom&pop store in general may lead to less evil/dollar than at walmart, and even within that store, choosing junk food manufactured by less evil corporations may be better. There are separate levels within the hierarchy of where your dollar is going, and optimizing less evil per dollar may not be straightforward. However, any progress on this front would be good -- imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result.
  - zarify 13y ago
    "imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result." I'm curious as to whether consistent consumer buying pressure actually makes a difference. We see companies making changes based on PR spikes relatively often, but it's less immediately apparent [to me, I don't have any data on this] whether a persistent negative image affects how they behave. Perhaps if there was data to go along with poorer sales, but you can't really corellate a lookup into a database on business practices or political activity with a lost sale either (ie X people looking up Product Y doesn't mean X less sales). This is looking at the situation with an eye to changing behaviour though, not simply putting bad operators out of business (or more likely just reducing profits) because there will always be bad operators.
ngoel36 13y ago
I went to TechStars For A Day in Boulder, and somebody was making this exact iPhone app. I can't tell you what it was named, but you would basically scan any product, and it would analyze how the product's manufacturer aligned with your views, and it would suggest competitors that aligned better. Furthermore, the "bad" brand would then offer you coupons to convince you to "forgive" their wrongdoing. Really, I saw it as an interesting social experiment for people & companies to gauge the dollar amount a person's values were worth to him.
- noloqy 13y ago
  I like the idea, but to be honest I think this is the wrong approach. People are not engaged with their consumption to the extent that they will go scanning all the products they purchase. What would work, though, is if you could inform people proactively before, at the moment of, or after the purchase. The last case might be interesting in order to inform consumers so that they will not purchase the product in the future. Lets imagine the situation where you walk into shoe store X, and it is known that the store is associated with child labor. I will not "google" this store before I enter it. However, if I get a push message the moment I enter it, indicating that I shouldn't want to buy here because I told the app that I am against child labor, I will respond to that!
startupfounder 13y ago
Yes, but... It's not so much about what I buy (though this is important), it is about how to incentivize politicians to be dependent on the people alone, not the .000042% that give 60% of the Super Pac funds. http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
pauldavis 13y ago
We've set out to do just this. Our web app analyzes your spending records from Mint, lets you set issue priorities, and recommends changes. We are in private beta. Our landing page is at switchuponline.com.
metavida 13y ago
Somebody should team up with the Better World Shopper folks (http://www.betterworldshopper.org http://www.betterworldshopper.org) to make this happen. They do currently have an iOS app, but it's still way more manual work than it sounds like the author of this article is looking for.
tomkinstinch 13y ago
GoodGuide[1] falls in this niche. The iOS app works well: just pick up a product and scan the barcode. 1. http://www.goodguide.com http://www.goodguide.com

32 points by jal278 13y ago

a3n 13y ago

"Someone needs to make a mint-like financial site that tells me when I am spending money on companies with policies that disagree with my morality or personal politics; I don’t have time to research when companies do horrible things, please help me be a better person anyways." All of them. HTH.

jal278 13y ago
I'd like to at least minimize evil per dollar
- zarify 13y ago
  Considering we've been trending toward the megacorp world for quite some time now you're probably better off growing/farming your own food and not worrying about the rest. That or starting your own pharma company for ulcer medication and antidepressants. That said, it'd be an interesting project, even if the metrics would be a complete nightmare; am I more pro- environmental regulation than I am pro- gun control? How do you rate Company X lobbying for Bill Y on a scale of Things I Don't Like?. I suppose you'd have to go down a machine learning path for individuals, maybe starting with presenting alternatives for whatever thing you're interested in spending money on, a la the plain English terms of service site that was set up a year or two ago (that I've lost the URL for[1]) and building a profile from there. Realistically though, I think the whole exercise would just depress anyone who took it on. [1]It was indeed http://tosdr.org/ http://tosdr.org/ - Thanks :) re-bookmarked!
  - eurleif 13y ago
    >a la the plain English terms of service site that was set up a year or two ago (that I've lost the URL for) I believe you're referring to: http://tosdr.org/ http://tosdr.org/
  - com2kid 13y ago
    > That said, it'd be an interesting project, even if the metrics would be a complete nightmare; am I more pro- environmental regulation than I am pro- gun control? How do you rate Company X lobbying for Bill Y on a scale of Things I Don't Like?. I suppose you'd have to go down a machine learning path for individuals, maybe starting with presenting alternatives for whatever thing you're interested in spending money on, a la the plain English terms of service site that was set up a year or two ago (that I've lost the URL for) and building a profile from there. It is even more complicated than that. What about some company that uses a Chinese factory that is known to employ workers under 18? Evil[1] right? Well sure, unless you dig in to the numbers and find out that the company mandates no under age workers in their portion of the factory. [1] See discussion below, definitions of evil vary!
    - count 13y ago
      What's wrong with workers under 18? I had 3 different jobs before I turned 18. Unskilled factory labor seems like a great fit for the teenage crowd. Hell, in the US, there isn't even a minimum age limit for farm labor[1], and the minimum age for non-farm labor is 14, with anybody over 16 being allowed to work unlimited/full-time hours[2]. [1]http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agriculturalemployment.htm http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agriculturalemployme... [2]http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agerequirements.htm http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agerequirements.htm
      - com2kid 13y ago
        > What's wrong with workers under 18? I had 3 different jobs before I turned 18. Unskilled factory labor seems like a great fit for the teenage crowd. A lot of people disagree with it and want to spend their money accordingly. Many of these issues are subjective, I fully agree that it often isn't black and white.
        sliverstorm 13y ago
        Right, so what you need is a slider. What's the cutoff age. 18? 16? 12? Of course, that's a distraction. I worked for the government when I was twelve, but I only worked an hour or two a week.
  - jal278 13y ago
    Maybe a more tractable approach would just be to have some kind of wiki that would just track articles for given companies along certain categories (e.g. the article on Walmart would have pro's/con's for the worker's rights category). Anything that centralizes this kind of information even if it doesn't completely parse out the good/bad would be nice
perlpimp 13y ago
Perhaps there needs be a some sort of inforgraphics based reporting system that will enable one to perform social communicating with slices of people that do also buy said product - to form groups that can tag together to form a pseudo political force with a specific task in mind. Kinda like what corporations were meant to do when they were drafted into law (in US). It can be used to build political counterweight to large corporations that want to flout law and regulatory guidances by way of subsidizing interests in the body of the government that performs such duties. As per every endeavour the devil is in the details like page rank, colors used for graphs and general consumability of said service.

tvst 13y ago

The problem with voting with your wallet is that the richer you are, the more times you can "vote". I'd rather vote with my actual vote.

jhart3333 13y ago
Lots of people voting with a few dollars each adds up and will get their attention.
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  Will it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmtm9CSLjaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmtm9CSLjaQ
  - jal278 13y ago
    Even if there is a great disparity in wealth, if the company in question depends upon selling products to the poor or middle-class, then this sort of strategy might still be effective
  - msandford 13y ago
    Wealth != purchasing power. The 1% might have 80% of the nation's wealth tied up but the middle class and the poor have all the purchasing power. So long as they're intent on saving a buck whatever the cost, corporations will pander to them just as hard as they possibly can. No matter the human toll. Walmart treats their employees poorly because that's what has to happen for Walmart to work like it does, and just wow does everyone love it. Walmart could go bankrupt in a year if everyone just started shopping at Target. But nobody does because it's not their problem.
jal278 13y ago
That's a true statement; but many companies that do terrible things make all their money not from the rich but from the middle-class and poor

chailatte 13y ago

that's easy. minimize your purchases with mega corporations. buy more from small businesses. btw, if your bank is jp morgan chase citibank bank of america hsbc you should be ashamed of yourself.

sp332 13y ago
That's hard to do without researching various umbrella corporations, sponsorships, partnerships, and investment deals. (edit) I meant this part: minimize your purchases with mega corporations. buy more from small businesses.
- jhart3333 13y ago
  Not really hard. Just move your money to a local bank or credit union. Easy. Edit: Not really hard to do that part either. Just do your grocery shopping at a locally owned market or farmers market instead of a nationwide chain. No need to avoid the national chains completely. Just move in that direction.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
gyardley 13y ago
Right. I should be ashamed of myself for putting my money with a bank large enough to have a chance of getting its own way vs. the federal government when push comes to shove. Instead, I should put my money with a small credit union with no money managers capable of getting me a decent return and so little clout when the proverbial shit hits the fan it'll be left to be roadkill. What could possibly go wrong?
- msandford 13y ago
  What return? The interest rates available these days are appalling. At this URL (after being prompted for a zip code) I was able to see a 120 month CD that yields 0.9% with anything less than 42 months being 0.15% yield. During the last meltdown we saw that the FDIC made everyone whole. Did you even hear about the NCUA bailing people out? I didn't. I tend to think that's because credit unions did OK during the crisis as most of them tend to keep their loans on their books and as a result, didn't get swept up in the diciest loans in the bubble. As a result I would suggest that perhaps the parent is correct and that credit unions are the way to go. Or is there some other kind of proverbial shit hitting the fan that you're referring to? In my mind if TSHTF, any money you have in the bank is gone; worthless or irretrievable. What's the scenario where it's bad enough you want/need the clout of a mega-bank but where the banking system and our government aren't both totally effed but a credit union is?

jhart3333 13y ago

This site is my quick and dirty start: http://dontbuytheircrap.com http://dontbuytheircrap.com But I haven't gotten around to building the tool yet. The idea is to have a mobile friendly web app that leverages social networking to help with this very problem. I didn't think there would be an opportunity for monetization. Maybe I was wrong.

rogerbinns 13y ago

I tried and failed to do this ten years ago. The basic premise was you scanned a product barcode at a store and would get useful information back. Americans almost entirely care about price so the first module I wrote scraped Amazon and gave back the Amazon price. I wanted any number of modules to give you other information relevant to your needs. Some examples: - Environmental (eg the furniture you just scanned was made from rainforest) - Nationalism (eg if you call support it will be answered by someone in a different country) - Manufacturer (eg pointing out another store carries all 5 colours instead of the 1 you see here) - Reviews (eg metacritic scores) - Social views (eg gay marriage) I was hoping that price would be the least useful piece of information, and provide a way for sources of information (eg Greenpeace) to be connected to consumers who wanted to know about that for the product right in front of them. Today you are still stuck with price, and in some cases reviews, and we are all the poorer for it.

mercuryrising 13y ago
I think the general attitude towards 'lowest price' in America is what could eventually bring the downfall of America (as we know it). I like thinking about the movement of the 'American system' as an evolution. Back in the day, all the stores were owned by a local person. You go to this store, that's Bob's store, he knows all about the fruit he gets, it's always the best, he goes over to the farmer's field and makes sure he gets the cream of the crop. From here we have a huge population of stores (like neurons competing / cooperating to be heard). All over America, people are employed by running their own stores. Until one day, when a super store comes on the scene. It sells things cheaper than the other stores, and it has a bigger selection. Bob doesn't work there, but they have pretty much the same produce. Maybe the high school kid working there doesn't know the farmer where the fruit came from, but that's not so bad, I didn't know that farmer when I bought the fruit at Bob's. Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, our world is shifted. Instead of going to the store, knowing the owner, striking up a conversation, getting the latest scoop on the happenings of the neighborhood, we go to the store to accomplish a task. This is efficiency, right? There's another shift too, and it's a personal shift (that might not happen to anyone). I go to Bob's store, and I see he mismarked his apples, they should be a $1 a piece, but they're $0.10 a piece. I don't want to rip Bob off, I know him, he's a great guy. I say "Hey Bob, is this right?" He says "Oh no, that's a mistake, sorry about that." That's alright, you have to make a living and I don't want to make you lose money by purchasing something from you. I go to a big box - they mispriced something. Maybe I can slip this by them, and the cashier won't know the real price... I mean, there's no real people to hurt, right? I'm not ripping anyone in particular off, just the company, which is a bunch of people, and no single one of them is going to be worse off because I purchase a mispriced item. Any way that you can represent that this purchase is not part of the 'race to the bottom of the barrel', that's great. All the efficiency in the world will not make a place that's happy for people. Efficiency is inhumanity.

crm416 13y ago

I'm not sure how well-supported this product has been (the website itself seems down, if that's any indicator), but https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buy-back-your-vote/id535014326?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buy-back-your-vote/id5350143... was done as a project last year in one of my university courses.

cupcake-unicorn 13y ago

How would this work for purchase, say, at a Grocery Store? The mom and pop grocer's down the road may have no evil corporate affiliation, but the makers of the junk food they're selling - that's a different story. It's so hard to pick out every little piece. As a parallel, I am a vegan, and I just have to accept that no matter how hard I try - even if I did have an app - I'm going to be using or ingesting animal products at some point. An app just can't take into account every little piece of the puzzle.

jal278 13y ago
The problem is definitely nuanced; shopping at a mom&pop store in general may lead to less evil/dollar than at walmart, and even within that store, choosing junk food manufactured by less evil corporations may be better. There are separate levels within the hierarchy of where your dollar is going, and optimizing less evil per dollar may not be straightforward. However, any progress on this front would be good -- imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result.
- zarify 13y ago
  "imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result." I'm curious as to whether consistent consumer buying pressure actually makes a difference. We see companies making changes based on PR spikes relatively often, but it's less immediately apparent [to me, I don't have any data on this] whether a persistent negative image affects how they behave. Perhaps if there was data to go along with poorer sales, but you can't really corellate a lookup into a database on business practices or political activity with a lost sale either (ie X people looking up Product Y doesn't mean X less sales). This is looking at the situation with an eye to changing behaviour though, not simply putting bad operators out of business (or more likely just reducing profits) because there will always be bad operators.

ngoel36 13y ago

I went to TechStars For A Day in Boulder, and somebody was making this exact iPhone app. I can't tell you what it was named, but you would basically scan any product, and it would analyze how the product's manufacturer aligned with your views, and it would suggest competitors that aligned better. Furthermore, the "bad" brand would then offer you coupons to convince you to "forgive" their wrongdoing. Really, I saw it as an interesting social experiment for people & companies to gauge the dollar amount a person's values were worth to him.

noloqy 13y ago
I like the idea, but to be honest I think this is the wrong approach. People are not engaged with their consumption to the extent that they will go scanning all the products they purchase. What would work, though, is if you could inform people proactively before, at the moment of, or after the purchase. The last case might be interesting in order to inform consumers so that they will not purchase the product in the future. Lets imagine the situation where you walk into shoe store X, and it is known that the store is associated with child labor. I will not "google" this store before I enter it. However, if I get a push message the moment I enter it, indicating that I shouldn't want to buy here because I told the app that I am against child labor, I will respond to that!

startupfounder 13y ago

Yes, but... It's not so much about what I buy (though this is important), it is about how to incentivize politicians to be dependent on the people alone, not the .000042% that give 60% of the Super Pac funds. http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...

pauldavis 13y ago

We've set out to do just this. Our web app analyzes your spending records from Mint, lets you set issue priorities, and recommends changes. We are in private beta. Our landing page is at switchuponline.com.

metavida 13y ago

Somebody should team up with the Better World Shopper folks (http://www.betterworldshopper.org http://www.betterworldshopper.org) to make this happen. They do currently have an iOS app, but it's still way more manual work than it sounds like the author of this article is looking for.

tomkinstinch 13y ago

GoodGuide[1] falls in this niche. The iOS app works well: just pick up a product and scan the barcode. 1. http://www.goodguide.com http://www.goodguide.com