Breast Cancer! Oh noes!!1
No, not me. Or anyone I know. But it IS official Breast Cancer Month, or something, which is why every single store/commercial/restaurant has been offering ways to give money to Breast Cancer Fighting. It’d be nice to hear some explanation of (1) why more money is really the limiting factor in Fighting Breast Cancer, and (2) how all this money goes to Fighting Breast Cancer. That is, how does the money go from my brand new Pink Iron actually improve things? Some accountability would be nice.
Also, more research on, say, early detection of lung & liver cancer. For instance. Of course, there’s no obvious color for Lung Cancer Awareness Ribbons or Liver Cancer Fighting Irons.
EDIT: Just so it’s clear, I really do support Breast Cancer Opposition. It’s the “Buy Something Pink and We Promise to Give the Money Away” that I find a bit silly. Then again, for those who (a) need a new iron anyway and (b) are willing to use one that’s pink, I guess it makes sense. No, I’m not in either of those categories…
….Well, shoot.
*returns the pink iron and pink desktop organizer and set of pink xbox controllers she’d already picked up for you for Christmas*
OF course, such merchandising ignores the fact that, if you want to provide additional funding for breast cancer research, you can simply write your own check to any fund, or participate in one of the 10 K races or whatever. And they are likely to be a little more accountable than the yogurt company or the iron mfgr. Not sure I would want to use a pink iron all the time myself.
For Tigger – well, as long as I can assure people that I didn’t pick out the pink ones myself…
For Mom – I guess the merchandising is because it’s a lot more effective to say “buy our pink iron and we’ll send $5 to somehow fund cancer-fighting efforts” than it is to ask people to pull out checkbooks – if it didn’t work, presumably they’d stop.
But is that because it’s easier to stick charity onto something you’d already be getting? or is it because people want to have a nice pink iron – perhaps to remind themselves (and their friends?) that they indirectly sort-of support Things to Fight Breast Cancer?
I’ll be optimistic and assume it’s the convenience
I think the merchandising is simply because they hope a lot of people are getting to be more likely to buy whatever it is as long as they can also convince themselves it’s somehow good for the environment or it’ll support nice things as well as washing their clothes/faces/hair/whatever.
I’m thinking of a few things in particular – there’s philosophy’s line of ‘shower gels for a cause,’ with causes ranging from breast cancer to ‘rainforest support’ and possibly AIDS research or something connected to that, for which they charge $20 or so for the same 16 ounce size of shower gel they’d normally charge $16 for… and they never specifically say ‘yes, we’re charging more, but for each bottle sold, we donate that extra $4 *plus* $x, so feel good, you’re donating and getting clean and using a limited-edition-campaign thing!’ Apparently it works nicely for them, those ’cause’ gels always seem to sell out quickly.
There’s also three things from Lush that I can think of as having specific notes on there that buying those items means that they’ll send a specific donation amount per bought item for two different causes…. though one item’s more vague and they just say ’100% of all proceeds will be donated’ without explaining that ‘hey, if we weren’t donating it, we’d be making $6 per pot!’ or whatever….
Oh sure – an iron is just an iron, but an iron that *also* helps “fight” breast cancer (in some mysterious way they don’t usually explain) is… well, it’s a Breast-Cancer-Fighting Iron! You *do* want all your stuff to be Fighting Breast Cancer, right? Even when you’re not watching it?
It’s really almost inevitable – everyone wants to differentiate their products from the rest, so that you’ll buy theirs rather than someone else’s. There’s only so many exotic vitamins and minerals and nutrients and rare botanicals they can stuff into one little jar of cream. And when most of the “benefits” are (1) difficult to set up with a control experiment and (2) largely subjective anyway, there’s kind of a limit to how much benefit people can be persuaded to see. So “philosophical benefits” are the next logical thing – “We made cream with fungus extract and acid in it – then we plastered a rather banal bit of free verse about hope on the side of this jar of face cream. It’s uplifting!” And costs them nothing, but the jar is still $38 for two ounces. (True product, although I’m not going to link to it.)
It’d be interesting to write to Lush (or one of these other “companies with a cause”) and ask them to post details of how many pots have been sold and how much money’s been sent and what it’s been used for…