Link:
http://www.benjerry.com/features/for_a_change/index.cfm
A new Ben & Jerry’s location just opened up in my hometown; this particular location is a nonprofit venture staffed with teenagers referred by a local nonprofit youth employment agency. (Disclaimer: obviously, I have a soft spot not only for Ben & Jerry’s, because they make a helluva product, but also for the agency, which helped place me in a number of jobs throughout my high school and college years. Both organizations do great work.) The kids work for 3-6 months at the store, gaining their first “real” employment experience, and the idea is that then they will move on to “meatier” jobs. The store gets employees with a positive attitude to work in an industry with notoriously high turnover. This part of the deal seems to be a win-win situation.
However, when sampling the store’s top-notch product last night, I saw a flyer for the program linked above. (It seems to be a spinoff on the Fair Trade coffee concept; my question probably applies equally to that program.) As a matter of morals and/or social policy, I’m all for teaching a man to fish and protecting him from the sharks, or even just the bigger fish, while he is becoming a better fisherman. But does it make economic sense? Is Ben & Jerry’s creating a potential economic liability for itself by trying to do good? Or is any potential liability counterbalanced by the marketing goodwill the program creates? Is it economically harmful in the long run to protect what should be private enterprises from more powerful socioeconomic forces? Should an American corporation even be in the business of influencing the outcome of economic events in foreign countries? Or do those who are able have a larger responsibility to level the economic playing field?
It’s a very libertarian idea. Me, I like it. As far as economic sense? Only one way to find out. I think that a good interviewing process could make it very effective.
“We are not able to buy all of our favorite ingredients from socially aligned sources. At times, the quality isn’t right, the volume doesn’t meet our needs, the price is more than we can realistically afford,”
If you note the last phrase it appears that Ben and Jerry’s is not so different than the average “greedy capitalist”. They just have a higher sell-out price for the their high minded morals.
It all sounds a little fascist to me: we don’t like your politics therefore we won’t do business with you.
It probably isn’t a liability to the company, first because if there is a big enough of a market of people who will pay a premium for this, then it will pay to be in that market. Second, they can slap that label on without really doing anything meaningful; i.e. it is cheaper to create this program than it is to make a better product – eat Breyers instead.
I’m not so sure that it’ll make the world a better place. First off, it is merely supporting the company’s personal vision of what’s good. They’re selling an image of a simpler life, small farming, etc. But is that the best for the people it’s affecting? As First Worlders who care, our job is to end Third World poverty rather than trying to enforce our nostalgia for 19th century America. Farming is a hard and unreliable way to make a living. There’s a reason that people move off farms. B&J would do more good trying to industrialize LDCs with clean technology. Second off, if they really cared about the plight of Third World farmers, they’d sell their products profitably and use the money to finance a campaign to end First World farm subsidies and trade barriers. That’s where the real problem lies.