Photo courtesy of by Essjay in NZ and is licenced under the Creative Commons License.
The following wisdom was brought to mind today from one of my blog friends, “The Daily Dish,” when she questioned on her blog today how products sold for 1 dollar are able to be sold for such a low price.
Take a ring of keys, place them down in front of you. What do you see? Keys right? Wrong. What is a key? What does it represent? A way in, a way out. A home. A car. Employment. Businesses making keys, providing shelter and protection for families. A steel mill, workers burning ore, machines creating heat, extracting metal used for keys. Migrant workers in mines, minimal wages providing food, small villages with dusty roads, ragged huts that don’t need keys. Steel-industry inheritance, caviar, a Jaguar; mansions with many doors, many locks that need many keys. Hot steel being shaped, not enough air, black lung desease. Fire extracting metal, interstate travel, truckers moving metal, making machines, to make keys. The key is never what you see. There is always more.
~From Acts of Faith, Iylanla Vanzant
Labor + materials = cheap Wal-Mart goods. I reject foreign made goods originating from sweatshop nations who abuse human rights. It might hurt the people in the short run, but it is better in the long run because it forces their leaders to enact changes.