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What is Dollar Voting?

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Dollar voting is the practice of carefully considering the impact of your purchases. It is an analogy that considers every dollar spent as a vote for what you believe in.
Common dollar voting considerations include the environment, human rights, social and cultural viewpoints. In theory, many of the world's problems could be solved with dollar voting as firms who damage the environment or mistreat communities would quickly disappear. The following are common elements of dollar voting.

Information

Product transparency such as labeling that allows customers to make their own decisions on issues such as healthy food and environmental practices. Ideally, labels include a link to an extensive product fact sheet that lists ingredients, production methods, chemicals used in production, countries of origin and environmental statistics such as land footprint.
Government mandated product labels currently tend to be overly simplistic and may actively avoid the controversial issues that might influence purchases.

Standards

Ethical consumer standards that evaluate products for consumers. Products that pass display an easy to identify certification mark. Consumers still need to inform themselves about the standard itself as people commonly make invalid assumptions about what popular certification marks represent.

Locus of Control

Many customers who care about environmental issues view it as a gigantic issue that can't be solved with their individual actions. In other words, they are unwilling to act because they view problems as beyond their control.
Overview: Dollar Voting
Type
Definition
Viewing every dollar you spend as a vote that has an impact upon local and global issues.
Value
Consumer demand is perhaps the single biggest force that drives change to economies, societies and the environment.
In many cases, consumer demand begins to transform an industry decades before government regulations step in. For example, seat belts were a popular option for cars by the mid 1950s. Seat belts weren't mandatory equipment in cars in the United States until 1968.
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