Better World Shopper

For Christmas, Mike gave Eric a book that has been hard for us to put down: The Better World Shopping Guide #2. In his introduction, author Ellis Jones says, "As consumers, we vote every single day with the purest form of power...money. The average American family spends $18,000 every year on goods and services. Think of it as casting 18,000 votes every year for the kind of world you want to live in." For some time, we have believed that conscious shopping is incredibly important, but have been frustrated about the lack of good information about which companies are doing good things for our world and its people and which are not--especially for the companies that are not the best or the worst, but are somewhere in the middle.

Ellis has examined over 1000 companies and has given them each a grade according to how they score in five areas:

Human Rights
The Environment
Animal Protection
Community Involvement
Social Justice

In his pocket guide, companies (and their most common brands) are divided into categories of products and ranked according to grade. "Corporate Heroes" and "Corporate Villains" are listed for each category and what they do that is so good or bad. We highly recommend this book to those who want to live out their values with their pocketbook and become more conscious shoppers.

The website betterworldshopper.com provides more detailed information about each company's rating and includes updates as practices change.

To get you thinking, here is the book's list of 10 best and worst companies:

10 Best
1. Seventh Generation
2. Working Assets
3. Eden Foods
4. Clif Bar
6. Honest Tea
7. Patagonia
8. Tom's of Maine
9. Ben & Jerry's
10. Aveda

10 Worst
1. Exxon-Mobil
2. Kraft
3. Wal-Mart
4. Chevron-Texaco
5. Pfizer
6. Nestle
7. General Electric
8. Archer Daniels Midland
9. General Motors
10. Tyson Foods

We have already found some practices we need to (and plan to) change and look forward to carrying this guide with us as we shop!