Shift in American Consumerism

According to FLO, global sales of fair trade products jumped by 47% in 2007. Today, TIME magazine published a great article about a shift in American consumerism. Here's the first paragraph of For American Consumers, A Responsibility Revolution, By Richard Stengel

Thursday, Sep. 10, 2009

Illustration by C.J. Burton for TIME

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," FDR said in 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression. "We know now that it is bad economics." We learned this all over again after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the shame of subprime mortgages and the brazen Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff. But even amid the Great Recession of 2009, people have been trading in their SUVs for Priuses, buying record amounts of fair-trade coffee and investing in socially responsible funds at higher rates than ever before. What we are discovering now, in the most uncertain economy since FDR's time, is that enlightened self-interest — call it a shared sense of responsibility — is good economics...

Read the article in its entirety and how the First Family already purchases fair trade products!