Socially Conscious Gifting

Penny Nickel at Money and Values has a great list of eco/socially conscious gift links.

While SFOrdinaryGirl was visiting, I happened to take her by Busboys and Poets in DC (the CityVista location). As we stopped in and looked at all the Fair Trade products available, I was really skeptical about everything. I can talk myself out of buying pretty much all things, except food. Yummy eats are my Achilles’ heel.

There were some lovely cute toys, but I was afraid that my toddler nephews might eat them and the paint was possibly toxic. How can I know that from foreign-made goods? Or how safe are the cute little ‘mercury glass’ ornaments when they break? I mean, if I had a web-enabled phone, I guess I could Google it while I shopped to find the answer. But is it the right thing to do to buy a little item for cheap because so that I can know someone was able to eat for a day? What about the fact that it undercuts an ornament made under safe-labor practices with OSHA oversight and a living wage?

SFOrdinaryGirl asked me if I shopped Etsy. I said no. I rarely buy stuff online. I don’t shop Etsy or eBay. I might do mail order from Barnes and Noble or Lands’ End. But the crafty alternative stuff out there I usually get locally from friends, farmers’ market or artist. Sometimes I feel like that’s the better thing to buy because it was locally made, and often locally sourced. What is better? (Even so, these days I think my last Lands’ End purchase was inside Sears, near home.)

I admitted to SFOrdinaryGirl that I will probably always still buy stuff made cheap overseas, but thinking about it and making the effort to know why I’m making the choice seems important. Is absently buying a gift simply because it’s marked ‘certified organic’ or ‘fair trade’ a good idea? Origin seems important too.

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