It has become almost a reflex to take a quick inventory of fair trade products when I'm visiting a store. Yesterday I spotted some FT jewellery in the shop at the Clark, for example.
I haven't been to Target for a while, and hardly ever buy groceries there anyway, but from a cursory look at their shelves today I learnt that they are currently stocking fair trade sugar (not widely available here, in contrast to the UK since Tate & Lyle went totally FT). Target also sells various FT teas and coffees, including those one-cup type coffees that go in a special machine. I couldn't find any FT chocolate though, so points off for that.
I usually do my grocery shopping in either Price Chopper or Hannaford. My local Price Chopper does quite well with standard FT products (coffee, tea, chocolate) and even stocks FT chocolate chips which I've never seen anywhere else. The local Hannaford offers a broadly similar range of products, plus some FT soaps, too.
In the above-mentioned supermarkets, the vast majority of available FT products are found in the "organic and natural" section. This is handy, in a way, for people like me who are looking to buy fair trade and can easily find what they want in one place. But I wonder if FT would become more mainstream more quickly if it appeared dotted about all over the store, as I'm pretty sure is now the case in the UK (where we don't do that "organic and natural" corral thing anyway, do we?). Certainly that's how it is in the Linton Co-op. I don't know if there are any considered theories about this. What do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment