Why shoppers don’t care about Bangladesh

Speak with your wallet, not with your soapbox. 

In polls, people say they abhor the use of sweatshops. When they go shopping, experts say, they either forget these opinions or choose not to act on them. It’s called the “social respectability” or “social desirability” bias.

“For more than 20 years, polls have been showing a large disconnect between consumers’ stated values and their actual purchases,” says Joel Makower, chairman and executive editor of business research company GreenBiz Group, in Oakland, Calif. “Dating back to the late 1980s, large majorities of Americans have been telling pollsters that they would gladly buy green or responsible or ethical products,” he says, “but the reality is that only a small percentage of them — usually well under 10% of shoppers — do this.”