If you’re reading this article, you probably don’t want your clothes stitched by workers in cramped, unsafe factories, your cacao harvested by children, or your home furnishings made by workers who are underpaid and overworked. Yet many of our shopping habits lead to these unintended consequences.
If you value equity, fairness and the rights of children to be children, buying fair trade products is an easy way to shop with your values and avoid supporting the unethical production of many of our goods.
Shopping with your values brings benefits beyond being the owner of a beautiful product. It makes you happier. It sounds cliche, but when you align your spending with the kind of world you want, it feels good. You’re not a victim of big corporations that mis-treat workers in complex global supply chains. You get to choose, for example, if you want to support fair treatment of farmers tending the coffee beans that make your morning brew.
Shopping with intention also benefits those beyond you and your family. Your choices help create lasting positive impact. When you purchase something, you send a positive signal to the market: “I’ll have more of that, please.” Companies hear your signal and continue to make more of the same product, under the same conditions. If it’s fair trade, you’re communicating that you want more fair trade products. Your spending—when combined with others’ spending—shapes what companies seek to produce, retail, and how they treat workers, the environment, and local communities. This in turn impacts which sectors of the economy grow and which shrink. Simply put: the more you buy fair trade products, the more will be produced.
We all know that money can’t buy you happiness. But making purchases that align with your values can. Deeper and longer lasting than a hit of dopamine, true happiness comes along when you:
• act in accordance with what you value
• are generous
• connect with community
• are grateful.
When your behaviors match your beliefs, you are in alignment and more connected with yourself, and you experience less internal friction. The less internal friction, the more ease and flow. You are who you say you are. You do as you say you do. Decisions are more comfortable and quicker because you know where you stand. There is less to fret over.
Acts of kindness and generosity can increase happiness, optimism, and satisfaction. There is evidence that helping others promotes physiological changes in your brain linked to happiness. Choosing items made by fairly paid workers is an act of generosity. Fair pay provides families a livelihood and a way beyond survival hood
Finally, gratefulness drives happiness, not the other way around. When you feel grateful, there is no room for magical thinking about what could be. You are content with what you have. Gratitude combined with happiness helps keep you in a state of “enoughness.” Like being sated after a fabulous, flavorful meal, you are satisfied. Being sated, you can counterbalance dopamine-driven impulses to buy more. Gratitude is also a powerful antidote for feeling any sense of lack or want. It saves you from the thousand paper cuts of scarcity that plague many people.
Fair trade is not only better for the producer, it’s also better for the shopper.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out my new book, Your Shopping Superpower; follow your values and better your world. It recommends the WFTO verification to shoppers looking for fair trade products. The book is available globally on Amazon as an e-book or audio book, and in the US in independent bookstores and all major book retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Target.
“This is a must-read for anyone wanting to leverage their purchase power to build a better world. Diane created the required field manual for responsible purchasing, converting passion into practice. She made it simple for us.”
Justin Dillon, Founder FRDM and Slavery Footprint
