If a dress cost less than a
tenner you have to ask questions about who is being exploited along
the chain to produce it so cheaply.
And as Primark found to its
cost when Panaroma did a bit of digging into the retailer's sources, keeping
track of your supply chain when there are numerous contractors and
subcontractors involved is no easy task.
Which brings us to the
Evening Standard and its latest giveaway. Today, the Standard has been handing
out free rucksacks with the paper - at least it has from the street vendor at
Hammersmith Broadway. Not great rucksacks. Not even as good as the free
rucksacks you get when you join a gym, but logo-emblazoned rucksacks
nonetheless.
Having shed 5% of its circulation since July, according to the
latest ABCs, it may be in need of a few creative promotions to bolster sales,
but would a little digging into where today's giveaway was sourced unearth any
unbecoming headlines?
Newspapers are right to
splash on exposés of exploited home and factory workers, slaving away to keep
the profit margins of multinationals good and healthy.
And don't the majority of us
feel some sense of guilt when we read such stories, recalling the cost of the
cheap T-shirts littering our wardrobes with the nagging feeling that something
had to give to get them on the shelves for such questionably low prices?
Editors would always like to
think the strength of their editorial offering is enough to sell a newspaper
without lavish promotions, although the realisation that it often isn't is also
understood.
But throw an ethically
sensitive product into the promotional mix - which admittedly is practically
anything these days though products with stitched seams always makes me doubly
nervous - and questions over a paper's ability to report objectively on such matters must
also be raised.
You would think, and hope,
that the Standard - all newspapers for that matter - asks the necessary
questions prior to going ahead with promotions. And it would be nice to think
that at the end of the chain of this particular giveaway are content, healthy
workers paid a living wage for their endeavour. I wouldn't want to unfairly
point the finger at the Standard. For all I know, the rucksacks cost a tenner
each and were put together by a workers' cooperative in Slough.
I have put a couple of calls
in and someone is trying to find out for me. Or perhaps someone from the
Standard can respond below and put my mind at ease.
In
the meantime, wear your rucksack with, erm, pride.
