I usually save my ranting for the middle of the week, but in all of the hype and excitement of the Alabama vs. Texas Championship Football game (ROLL TIDE!  And what an amazing game it was!  For BOTH Teams!), I have been buried in work and prepping for the game.  This morning, something caught my attention.  Something that frustrated me beyond normal levels of frustration and disgust.

BurghBaby posted yesterday about a New York Times article that reported the wasteful behavior of H & M.  Rather than donating clothes to homeless shelters or non-profits who could deliver the throw away/old/out of date clothes to needy families, management instructed the employees to take the perfectly wearable, perfectly fine clothing items (including coats and gloves) and shred them before throwing them away so no one could use them. 

I’ve worked in retail stores where merchandise is discarded because it’s unusable.  I’ve also worked in restaurants where food left over at the end of the day was donated to shelters and given to employees for their families.  I have never, thankfully, worked for a company who routinely destroyed items they no longer fell they can profit from, specifically so NO ONE could gain from them.  That, my friends, is the epitome of waste, corporate greed, and lack of empathy.

You should read both the article, and BurghBaby’s response to it.  Before posting, she jumped on to Twitter to find out if, in fact, H & M’s claims that it was an “isolated incident” were accurate.  She also wanted to know if this was a common retail practice.

Can you guess what the response was?

Thus far, employees (current and past) of the following companies have identified them as destroying clothing and merchandise:

•  H & M (confirmed by employees from multiple stores nationwide)
• Abercrombie & Fitch
• Hallmark
• TJ MAXX
• Dairy Queen
• Macy’s
• Gabriel Brothers (!!)

Stores that have been confirmed to donate items as charitable contributions:

• Target
• American Eagle
• GAP
• Urban Outfitters
• Panera
• Charlotte Russe
• Disney

I’m in agreement with Burghbaby, that in some cases, merchandise isn’t able to be donated because of condition, or even usefulness.  But if H & M “regularly donates their unsellable clothes to charitable causes” then why are employees across the country being told to shred clothing and trash them?  Why are bags upon bags of shredded clothing sitting in dumpsters when charitable causes are pleading for donations across the world? 

In light of this, Burghbaby and I are compiling a list of stores and restaurants who practice wasteful destruction of goods.  I know quite a few friends and family members of mine have worked in retail over the years, so please, if you know of a store that isn’t on this list, please let me know!  And if you have your own example, please share. 

I’m not demanding everyone throw down their gloves and boycott every store on this list — that’s up to you.  I just know that after seeing these lists, I have some thinking to do, and some new stores to try out.  Gathering this list is hopefully just the first step.  Maybe we can connect companies with groups willing to take the goods off their hands, maybe we can help orchestrate a group/s to transport goods between donator and recipient.  Maybe we can bring awareness to  businesses about how consumers think.  There are plenty of options, folks, but the first step in uncovering the waste.

**Day three smoke free!!**

It has certainly been a while, hasn’t it? 

We moved to our lovely new place in Baltimore with some difficulty and exhaustion, but move we did.  The kitchen is amazing, and the soaking jacuzzi tub is divine!  We traveled home to help a one @DjLunchbox move to his new abode on the weekend of Halloween and handed out candy to the kids in my parents’ neighborhood.  Both Jack and I got sick to varying degrees, and only this week are we starting to feel better and back to normal.  There have been visits to local restaurants, a visit to the Walters Art Museum to see the Heroes: Mortals and Myth in the Ancient World exhibit and a lecture that had me resorting to my old intellectual elitist mentality, unfortunately.  But hey, I’ve accepted it.  We headed back to Brewer’s Art for the Baltimore Tweetup this week, and finally got to put some faces to the Baltimore names we’ve been seeing flit over our screens.

All in all, it’s been pretty wonderful.

So why the deep thinking recently?  I’m not asking you for answers, I suppose, but throwing thoughts against a screen to try and figure things out.  I’m feeling a very real, very visceral need to read Anna Karenina again.  Every year or two I revisit the novel, cover to cover, and every time I read it I gain a little deeper insight into the human condition.  I need something from that text, specifically.  It’s full of love, passion, lust, hate, lies, death, hope, and social and emotional roller coasters that only the classic Russian novels provide for me.  It’s beautiful language, and sometimes you need to be surrounded by someone else’s beautiful things and thoughts, and complex emotions and feelings in order to put your own world into perspective.  I’ve always argued that people watch reality TV for the same reason they went to the theater to see Shakespeare, or to the Colosseum to see gladiator games — Not for violence or cruelty, or tragedy alone, but to see other people going through something far worse than yourself.  For me, literature and music are the only things that can provide that kind of escapist comfort.  There’s something beautiful about language and imagery, and for me, reading all of Anna Karenina is to get to this one paragraph:

“She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever. ”

-Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Part 7, Chapter 31)

No, it’s not enough just to read that paragraph. Yes I need to reread the entire novel.  And maybe War and Peace again as well.  I’ve neglected classic literature for far too long, and I need to remedy that immediately.  Before it would be a short span of time — a month or two, at best — but this time… this time I am left feeling marooned after many months away.  Anna always brings me out of a black cloud kind of week or month.  Literature can do that for me.  Othello and Hamlet do that for me.  Sylvia Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” does that for me.  Casablanca does that for me.  Francisco de Zurbaran’s The Crucifixion (1627)  will always do that for me.

I wonder what the books or plays impact the worlds of others as profoundly as  Anna Karenina impacts mine… (hint… )

It looks like the sky is falling again.

Yesterday the FTC announced that, “beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.”  Immediately bloggers, Twitterers, and Message board trolls whipped themselves into a fervor over the regulations announced by the FTC. 

I don’t get it.

Do people not read anymore? Has it really come to a point where people take a headline and run with their anti-whatever mentality without actually reading the issue/article/ruling/judgment for themselves to see if they even disagree?  Just because you may sit on one side of the political pyramid doesn’t mean that you automatically agree or disagree with a statement or ruling based on whether something is said by a governing body or not.  We rail against people who don’t think before they vote, or who don’t bother to get the facts when it comes to an election, so why is it any different when it comes to regulations?  We’ve become a country of knee jerk reactionists who want everything to fall in line with our personal ideologies, and if it doesn’t, regardless of the inherent value of the idea, it’s wrong and bad, and it will cause your children to grow up godless and destitute—or worse yet, as humanitarians or socialists!  FOR SHAME!

I honestly expected more from the Social Media community.  Maybe I was naive.

First, read the damn ruling. 

The first three sections review the commission’s examination of the guides, the comments on proposed revisions by interested representative parties, and then gives a description of each change to proposed guides published in 2008.  The comments (section II) are worth reading.  The revised Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising are section IV.  They start on page 55. READ THEM.

Second, establish whether your argument is based on puffed up political ego for the sake of making a point, or on the actual issue of deceitful practices.  If you just want to grandstand about a political viewpoint, please move along… nothing left for you to see here… If you have a blog, if you’ve ever reviewed something that was sent to you by a company, if you aren’t sure where you stand because you don’t know how it effects you, then please continue reading.

Where do you fall?  Why does it matter?  What is the purpose of your blog?  Is reviewing X Product/s the primary purpose of the blog? Do you consistently receive products (in my case, books) to review?  Is the editorial independence of your blog clear if you are not endorsing a company/product? Are reviews likely to be negative as well as positive?

Are you a blogger who has joined a pay-per-post community?  Are you part of a “group” that is compensated by companies to endorse (speak highly of their product regardless of perceived value/quality) their product?  Do you receive “gifts” because you are part of a blogging network or community in the hopes that you’ll tell your readers how wonderful a product is (i.e. free advertisement and “word of mouth” endorsement based on your perceived trust level with your readers)?  Do you routinely review products from the same company positively in order to continue receiving comp products in exchange for your visible approval of their company/product?  Do your readers know that the car you just got, or the phone you’re raving about was given to you with the understanding that you would tell them how glorious it was whether you felt that way or not?

Like it or not, the FTC is forcing companies and bloggers to be ethical in their interactions with their consumers.  It’s not about censorship or telling bloggers what to say or what not to say.  It’s about fair practice and ethics.  The government isn’t dictating what you can or can’t say on your blog.  Anyone who sees that clearly isn’t reading the document.  It’s about fair business and advertising practice.  It’s about stopping companies and individual bloggers who are profiting off of their readership & consumer base through deceitful means.  If you receive “gifts” or “comps” from companies to review and your review is as likely to be negative as it is positive, and your readership is aware of this, that’s one thing.  If your blog is a personal blog dedicated to the life of your prize beagle, and Alpo begins sending you products for free with the understanding that you will continue receiving these products as long as you speak highly of the company, and you never disclose that relationship or business transaction (and it IS a business transaction) to your audience then you are misleading them.  Would your readers think differently of the value of your opinion on those products if they knew of your arrangement? 

Look, if you want to shill for a company, that’s fine.  If you want to play in the Pay-Per-Post pool, that’s fine too.  But do NOT make waves about being considered a BRAND and then balk when you’re expected to follow the same ethics and standards that businesses are expected to follow.  If you have nothing to hide, then why the big fuss about the disclaimer?  Well… if you receive a car, or a computer, or a trip around the world and then rave about the magnificence of the car, computer, and travel company and you never disclose it as a “gift”…  or as a “business transaction,” well then, it’s not just your audience that you have to worry about, now is it? 

IRS anyone?