Caring Capitalism

Pay $1.80 for a bottle of Ethos Water every day for a year, and you’ll have donated less than $20 to the cause of clean drinking water. For the $48 you might have spent on ikat-patterned, soft-soled Toms Shoes, you could buy a similar pair of cloth shoes and have $24 left over to direct to charities meeting children’s needs: not just shoes, but food and health care. In almost every instance, we can do more good by buying fewer goods or less expensive substitutes and donating the surplus directly to charities instead of filtering it through a corporation.

There very well may be such a thing as caring capitalism, but the last few years of cause marketing evidence the opposite: corporations re-branding themselves with charitable causes seem to have funded the brands more than the causes. Both Toms and Ethos Water have made hundreds of millions of dollars while donating a million pairs of shoes and a few million dollars; both companies have also come under additional scrutiny for failing to honor their philanthropic promises. For Toms, it’s where they manufacture their shoes and how their shoe donation practices fail to generate long-term benefits like jobs or infrastructure; for Ethos, it’s their steep mark-up on the designer water and the environmental costs of millions of plastic bottles.

Pacific Standard columnist Casey Cep points out that we all have good intentions when buying products from companies that donate a part of the money to make to charitable causes, but if we really want our dollars to make a greater impact, we should donate directly to the causes we want to support. I’ve always wanted to buy a pair of TOMS because I like the idea that the company will help a person in need for every pair of shoes purchased (their so-called “one for one” movement), though I have to admit that I’m more keen on the giving part, and less on the actual shoes part, so it’d make more sense for me to just give.

Photo: Ohnodoom! Collective

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