Do You Know Your Stuff?

By TIM KILLEEN

Last weekend I was at the farmer's market with a friend picking up produce for the week. Here in Chicago we get local produce from other parts of Illinois, as well as Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan. As we walked around looking for the stuff we needed, I told her to check for any tents of farms in Michigan (of which there were a few). Faithful readers are aware that I grew up in Detroit and that I do what I can to help the desperately hurting economy in Michigan.

This got me thinking about purchasing with a purpose. It is, of course, all the rage these days. People buy locally-grown things to help their local economy, to get things fresher and to cut down on emissions for shipping. And with the latest Gulf Coast disaster, people have looked to what they purchase for ways to help out the economy down there. I've written several pieces on the subject, such as drinking local beer, a brewery in New Orleans offering a good solution, using your vacation dollars to stimulate struggling economies and purchasing goods to help international development. But how much do we really think about what we buy?

I usually think about the origins of produce, beer and wine, coffee (to an extent) and sometimes clothing. But I purchase a whole lot more that I never think of. Where was my Ikea bookshelf made? Where was that candle on that shelf over there made? Where were the shoes I'm wearing made? What about the bread I had with dinner, where was that baked? Of course, 9 times out of 10 your answer will be "China," but there are ways around that (not that China's a terrible place).

Lots of businesses make some quality stuff in areas that could really use your purchase. There's a candle store up the street from me that I've never gone to (I usually just grab whatever's cheap at Walgreens and will make my place smell less like a bachelor lives there). There may be a furniture manufacturer in North Carolina teetering on laying off another worker; or a Wisconsin dairy farmer who's having trouble making mortgage payments. Sure, these things may be a little more expensive- and that's no little thing these days- and will take a little bit longer to track down, but it's certainly worth the effort. I hear a lot of arguments about people getting something for nothing through "entitlements," but I hear very little about an obvious alternative solution to help pick them up: buying the stuff they make. You'll probably buy something this weekend, give it a thought- get to know your stuff.

Buying International Development

The handout/hand-up debate has raged for years regarding the best way to help boost the economies and the per capita incomes in developing countries, and it has certainly heated up in the past few years. A couple weeks ago, TIME ran this story which noted that some experts on international aid were criticizing a man's efforts to send t-shirts over to Africa, claiming that such aid actually hurt the people of Africa, rather than helped. Of course, they said, his heart was in the right place, but would-be do-gooders need to consider the best course of action before plunging into the international aid world.

A while back, I noted in a post that the face of charity, as we know it, is changing somewhat from a "handout" model to one of social entrepreneurship. An extension of that, perhaps, is social consumerism. Certainly, buying products to assist a particular population has existed for a long while and has continued to gain steam lately. Large companies like Starbucks offer products that both raise awareness and help the company's public image. Small websites like The Hunger Site and companies like Ten Thousand Villages offer products created by craftsmen in developing countries to take out the middleman and get more money from the consumer to the producer.

Perhaps, then, in addition to aid dollars, developed nations should be investing in the infrastructure necessary for developing countries to gain easier access to world markets. In an Economist article, the example of Good African coffee is given to show that there are solid businesses coming out of Africa and, surely, other poor countries. What entrepreneurs in those places need less than aid money is venture capital, better transportation means to ship their products as inexpensively as possible, the lowering of certain trade barriers, and eventually, consumers in world markets who recognize the brand and quality of their product. This is, I suppose, a combination of a handout and a hand-up, but clearly the old method isn't working and something needs to be done as gaps in world economies continue to widen.