In order for you as a consumer to truly understand the impact of your spending dollars, we’re going to need a lot more information from companies.
It would make everyone’s life easier if the business community was enlisted as a partner rather than an adversary.
But we can’t let businesses only be transparent when it suits them.
We need to keep the pressure on companies to explain their true social impact.
We need to demand companies answer tough questions like:
- What are your political contributions? Who are you donating to? What policies are you pursuing?
- What is your impact on the environment? How are you measuring it? What are you doing to decrease your impact?
- What do you pay in taxes? What loopholes are you using to lower what you pay?
- How do you treat your employees? How are your average employees paid compared to executives and shareholders? How many of your employees aren’t paid a living wage?
- How many women and minorities do you employ? How are they paid? What percent of leadership do they comprise?
- Where do you spend your marketing dollars? Are your marketing dollars rewarding programming that exacerbate social and political division?
- How do you source your materials? How much of the materials you use come from conflict areas?
And so much more.
#AskBusiness is a rallying cry to keep the pressure on business.
Once enough people like you ask them the same questions, it will make it easier for companies to open up.
Some companies will move toward greater transparency faster, and as those are rewarded other companies will have to follow or be left behind.
We’re in the process of organizing issues and related questions we need answers to in order to understand the true impact of our purchasing decisions.
We’d like to get to a place where consumers can easily compare similar brands when shopping, or examine specific issues to see what companies are contributing to improvement and which are making things worse.
What do you think? What information do you want to know before you make a purchasing decision?
Let us know by Tweeting with the Hashtag – #askBusiness