Turkey is Not a Secular State

The most recent ruling on Turkey’s headscarf debacle overturns legislation passed in February permitting women to wear headscarves to university. The country’s highest court has ruled that lifting the ban on headscarves was in violation of the country’s secular principles.

This is one of the more ignorant rulings I’ve heard in a while.

Being truly secular doesn’t imply banning all symbols of religious expression of all types; it means allowing the space for people of all faiths to express themselves, however they please, as long as they use peaceful means.

The issue in Turkey is particularly controversial due to the social implications of banning the hijab. Critics of the new law rightly point out that banning the veil will deny women who are committed to wearing it from an education.

While some see the veil as a symbol of oppression that has been forced on Muslim women, others point out that it is a purely voluntary act for many.

There are those who argue that just because it’s voluntary, doesn’t mean it’s “right.” It’s the responsibility of those who “know better” to “uplift” these women from their predicament, and to help them move beyond their conservative ways and to realize how oppressed they are. Newsflash – that’s how Iraq happened. (There’s a great poster hanging in my office that says: “Be nice to America or we’ll bring democracy to your country.” Sums things up quite nicely.)

Now I’m totally in agreement that there are many things that Muslim women (particularly in staunchly conservative countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) should mobilize to fight for — the right to an education, the right to work, the right to dress how one pleases, the right to have sexual relations before marriage, the list goes one – you get the point. But banning someone from wearing an article of clothing that they have grown up wearing – that’s like telling a vegetarian that he has to eat meat because he lives in America which doesn’t call itself a vegetarian country. It’s ludicrous.

Where women are part of a society in which interaction happens to be constructed around wearing an article of clothing, forcing them to abdicate this clothing immediately is also (even if unwittingly) forcing them to constrain, perhaps even end, all social interaction. And this could come from the women herself as many Muslim women refuse to be seen in public without the hijab.

Sure things have to change – the idea of the hijab has to move from being a male ideal to being something that women themselves get to decide on. But forcing “enlightenment” on someone is not the way to go. Incidentally the court that made this decision has 7 male judges and only 2 females. Turkey should focus its resources on ensuring equal rights for men and women, rather than on battling to protect its “secular” nature by killing religious expression.

The Ringing Could Soon Be Everywhere

I was on the subway with one of my louder friends the other day when he said something particularly embarrassing. Red-faced I shushed him vigorously and looked furtively around to see how many people were chuckling. Talk about anticlimactic. Nobody.

Every single one of our surrounding co-passengers who sat within earshot had headphones planted firmly in their ears, seemingly content to just sit back and let the music keep them company. I was amazed.

It’s not really a new phenomenon that many people who ride New York’s subway carry iPods or other MP3 players. I just had never had an occasion to notice how large this number actually is. People keep inter-personal interaction to a minimum– no looking, no talking, no touching (well not of one’s own volition anyway). The music is just another way to keep the invisible walls impenetrable.

Listening to music on the subway isn’t a bad thing at all – before it seems like I’m heading down that path — but last week’s incident (or lack of) has made me think about how public transport systems are increasingly being populated by more and more gadget wielders.

A recent piece of tech news: In the near future, possibly even next year, people may be able to freely use their cell phones on airplanes flying over EU airspace. Plans have already been developed to allow mobile phone usage above 3000 meters, without the risk of interference with the aircraft navigation systems.

Less newsworthy is the fact that New Yorkers will soon be able to use their cell phones underground. The Metropolitan Transport Authority recently announced a plan by which all 277 subway stations would be wired for cell phone and wireless Internet connectivity over the next six years. Reportedly, Transit Wireless, the company that will be installing the equipment, will also provide the MTA with the potential to extend the cell phone and wireless capabilities to subway tunnels. So far, the MTA has indicated no intention of doing so. Some seem to think they should.

Now I love using my phone; I love chatting with people. And particularly when I’m suspended in a tubular vacuum, staring blankly at the Delta ad in front of me and trying to decrypt the garbled sounds from above that are meant to keep everyone informed, the prospect of having a familiar voice just a button away to help pass the time sounds pretty appealing. The problem? It sounds pretty appealing to just about everyone.

Technology itself — if intended for humane purposes, to facilitate interaction, solve a problem or make life easier — can be wonderful. Problems arise around the way in which people choose to harness this technology. Sometimes, depending on the type of device and the way people choose to use it, too much technology can be a bad thing.

We already use cell phones in trains and on buses; so far with the help of guilt inducing announcements about being courteous or under the glares of their tired co-passengers, people have managed to stay pretty quiet.

But flights across Europe? Hour long subway rides from Queens to Brooklyn? The former is less daunting – people are more courteous on flights, and if nothing else, the higher prices of cell phone calls will act as a deterrent. But the latter? Sounds like a capsule shaped nightmare to me.

On the bright side, the less invasive usage of cell phones mid-air is far more likely to materialize in the near future than the ability to use phones in subway tunnels. The MTA seems to share the idea that cell phone usage on subways is a bad idea.

To be fair, like with most technology, as long as the usage of cell phones on subways, planes and other modes of public transport can be monitored or restricted, it could be a positive thing – particularly in emergency situations when riders are trapped underground. But for now, confining the extension of underground cell phone signals to subway stations is fine by me. It’s the one part of my day when, away from my cell phone and the phones of others, I get to catch up on reading, listen to music or just snatch some “me” time during which no verbal responses are expected.

Marketing Lessons From Beer

Mmmmm Beer. There’s nothing like a cold sip to wash things down smoothly. When recently, in passing, I asked a group people about their views on beer, I was offered a spectrum of different views: it’s a comfort factor, an every day drink, the beginning of (or perhaps the end to) a wild night out, a lazy Saturday afternoon in front of the TV, a frat boy’s drink, and for some (like a loquacious group of old men who ritualistically visited the pub I used to work at in London,) just a way of life.

Whatever its connotation for you, it’s clear that beer, more than any other alcoholic drink, has a deeply entrenched fan following. A BBC article on beer got me thinking – perhaps the lessons we learn from beer can also be applied elsewhere.

The article lists 5 reasons as to why beer sales have slumped – apparently they are at their lowest level since the 1930s.

Health: There is a misconception that beer is less healthy, and more fattening, than other alcoholic beverages. But studies have shown that beer drinkers and drinkers of similar volumes of other alcoholic drinks, gain the same amount of weight around their stomachs (refuting the notion of the beer-belly.) The British Beer and Pub Association argues that a beer with the typical 4.6% of alcohol is less fattening than wine, and significantly less fattening than spirits, which contain 6 times more calories even without the sodas they are so often mixed with.

Dr Martin Bobak, an epidemiologist at University College London, argues that the idea that beer makes one fat stems from the fact that less educated people show a stronger proclivity to drink beer. In the West the less educated one is, the more obese one is likely to be, and hence, he relates beer drinking to education, and in turn to obesity.

The lesson here for everyone else is pretty obvious: people are becoming more and more health conscious. In an age of gym memberships and organic foods, if your product is labeled as having health issues, it could knock you out of the game. Keep this in mind as your research, innovate and market.

Food: Over the years, pubs have boosted their emphasis on food, and as a result beer has suffered. People tend to drink wine with their food over beer, plus nowadays people go to pubs not just to drink beer, but sometimes solely to eat.

This is pretty specific to beer and pub food, but there is something of a takeaway: Changes in context matter. Consider the bigger picture when you make business decisions. Is setting up a website going to erode your magazine for instance? Is allowing customers to sit around and read at Barnes and Noble, or listen to music at Virgin going to prevent them from wanting to make a purchase? A rise in something else’s popularity, even if mandated by you, could erode your own market, so look before you leap.

Women: Pubs have become more women-friendly, but sales of beer have not kept up with the increased clientele. Women tend to avoid beer in favor of other drinks, due to cultural factors, and image association issues: beer is seen as a “man’s drink.”

My thoughts after reading this — unless you have a very specific target audience, make a conscious attempt to cast your net wide. If your clothes aren’t just for hipsters, your tofu not just for tree huggers, your social network not just for teenagers and your beverages not just for men, well market yourself accordingly.

Cultural Changes: The article collates several cultural reasons for beer’s decline – the decline of manual labor, the drink driving campaign of the 80s, the availability of beer in supermarkets coupled with the rise of satellite TV at home, and a rise in club culture that has made the use of recreational drugs more common.

I don’t really have much to say on this one: cultural changes will happen. Companies and marketers just need to be aware of, and possibly foresee, these — in an attempt to engage in damage control or to exploit potential opportunities.

Fashion: A quest to be more fashionable and adventurous, as well as an increasing range of choice in the beverages market, has also contributed to the slump in beer sales.

My take on this: You can’t prevent other products in your market from mushrooming, but you can make an attempt to stay competitive by identifying, and where possible catering to, emerging trends, and by innovating.

Something to be careful about however is the danger of taking a perfectly good brand or product and innovating just for the sake of a fresh look or a wider audience. (Tim Manners, one of Fast Company’s marketing columnists, wrote a post on this.) Beer can be particularly hard to innovate well with, and breweries could risk diluting their existing markets by attempting to do so. The trick may be to leave the product untouched and attempt to influence consumer perceptions, or recruit new consumers, through smart marketing campaigns.

Free Rice: Feed the Hungry, Spruce Up Your English

On one of my more lethargic post-lunch procrastination sessions recently, after a particularly soporific curry, I stumbled upon Free Rice, a site that a friend had sent me a while ago but I hadn’t really taken the time to look at.

Half an hour later my food coma had lifted but I was still clicking away. Talk about addictive… The thing was I didn’t really feel all that guilty.

A sister site of Poverty.com, Free Rice aims to help people improve their English while simultaneously using the process by which they do to provide food to hungry people. A laudable goal (or two depending how you look at it.) How it works is the site provides a word and then provides you with options from which you have to pick the correct one.

Urbane
a) Lackluster
b) Suave
c) Wrathful
d) Bear-like

There’s a mix of words so that the site appeals to people who have a very basic grasp of English as well as to the more erudite. The program keeps track of each word one gets right or wrong and then adjusts the difficulty level accordingly, hence keeping you interested.

Until yesterday, for every word you got right, Free Rice donated 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger. As of today, it has started donating 20 grains. Pretty cool…

I sent the site to a whole bunch of people I know and the overwhelmingly positive reactions it elicited got me thinking about how remarkable it is that something this simple can be so effective.

What can other non-profits learn? First and most importantly, if you can make doing good fun, there’s nothing like it. People like to feel good about themselves, like they’re responsible citizens of the world who care about more than shopping and football. But at the same time, if a good deed takes away from other parts of their lives, or is boring and tedious, the likelihood that people will do good decreases drastically.

Which leads me to my next point: simplicity is key. The great part about Free Rice is just how simple giving is — no long and annoying forms, no credit card numbers, no billing addresses, no trawling through lines of disclaimers. Just a lazy click of a button and you can pat yourself on the back. Sounds a bit dodgy admittedly, but the site makes money off advertising.

The design of the website supports this. It’s clean and uncluttered, featuring very little other than a green background of rice crops and the bowl of rice that is populated by your English proficiency. An updated count of your score ensures that you want to keep going: “You have now donated 600 grains of rice.”

Apart from being just fun, there’s something valuable in it for you too: as you better the world, you’re simultaneously bettering yourself — incentive to keep going.

The site has also somehow managed to make itself viral and addictive — (I’ve had about 5 different people tell me how addictive they find it in the last two hours.)And it’s different to most other non-profit efforts out there. People who use it want to talk about it. An editor at Fast Company, Kevin Ohannessian, unabashedly told me that he donated 2000 grains on the first day of discovering the site. Not a bad way to spend one’s time while you’re net trawling through the day.

Tax the Beautiful to Feed the Ugly?!

I read a BBC article a few months ago on how ‘Ugly people in Argentina are striking back.’ A man named Gonzalo Otalora has been “ugly” all his life and he’s taken it upon himself to bridge the gap between the beautiful and the ugly so to speak. He sees beauty as a “natural advantage,” and is determined that beautiful people be taxed in order to offset the inherent advantages they have over ugly people such as himself.

My first thought upon reading this? Wow. That’s some strong feeling. The guy candidly admits to the BBC that all his life he has been a victim of his looks. “I was a child with thick glasses, spots and braces,” he said. “The kids made fun of me at school… Later the girls rejected me in the discos. And then when I was looking for work, I felt so ugly and insecure that I was rejected again and left without a job.”

The article really got me thinking. Are these advantages that beautiful people have really so very advantageous? Are they particularly pronounced in the workplace or at least in the often tumultuous and competitive road to getting a job? Does a finely chiseled face command more authority than an awkward, saggy one? Does a strapping, barrel chested man come upon better business opportunities than his skinnier colleagues? And if so, are the decisions to bestow such advantages conscious?

In a paper entitled Beauty and the Labor Market, University of Texas Professor Daniel S. Hamermesh and Michigan State University Professor Jeff Biddle argue that:

“Holding constant demographic and labor-market characteristics, plain people earn less than people of average looks, who earn less than the good-looking. The penalty for plainness is 5 to 10 percent, slightly larger than the premium for beauty. The effects are slightly larger for men than women; but unattractive women are less likely than others to participate in the labor force and are more likely to be married to men with unexpectedly low human capital.”

In another report entitled “Beauty, Productivity and Discrimination: Lawyers’, Looks and Lucre,” the two professors present evidence showing that how handsome a male attorney is has a directly bearing on how likely he is to attain early partnership directly correlates with how handsome he is. They could not clearly deduce whether the effect was because clients discriminate or because better-looking lawyers were able to obtain greater pecuniary gains for their clients.

In 2000, a London Guildhall University study revealed that men considered to be unattractive earn 15% less, equal to £3,000 on a salary of £20,000. It showed that “unattractive” secretaries earn some 15% less than prettier colleagues, and plain women on average, earn 11% less than men.

A CareerBuilders.com article points out that it’s not just looks — size matters too. It cites a University of Pittsburgh survey of male graduates, which reveals that the tallest students had an average starting salary that was 12 percent higher than their shorter colleagues.

The London Guidhall study showed that across all professions tall men earned an extra £1,000 for every £10,000 earned by short men.

Researcher Barry Harper, of the London Guildhall University told the BBC that something needed to be done. “The effects of appearance are generally widespread suggesting they arise from prejudice and in particular, employer discrimination. There is an urgent need for business and government to review their equal opportunities policy to address this issue.”

Okay. So does all this mean that Gonzalo Otalora is right? If being ugly, short or overweight affects your pay packet, as statistics certainly seem to indicate, should good-looking people really be taxed for the sake of their disadvantaged counterparts? My first instinct is to say no, the whole idea is ludicrous and if people really are talented or hardworking or smart enough, well they’ll get to where they deserve to be, good looking or not. Some could construe this as smacking faintly of idealism or naiveté however, and I’d be curious to know what other people think. The fact that ideas about beauty are necessarily subjective and amorphous, at least to a certain degree, adds further complexity to the issue.

Something to keep in mind is that the aforementioned research seems to refer mostly to people within companies and organizations. Looks seem to have little bearing on successful entrepreneurs or those of self-made fortune. A cursory glance at Forbes’ billionaires list is evidence enough that you don’t always need good looks to make money.

Coca Cola Buys a Major Stake in Honest Tea

The best thing that ever happened to organic tea company Honest Tea or a slow but controlled brand implosion?

Coca-Cola announced back in February that it was buying 40% of Honest Tea, the nation’s largest selling brand of organic bottled tea. Coke’s decision to become a majority player in the organic tea brand is in line with earlier decisions to cast its net outside the traditional soda industry with brands like Minute Maid (bought over forty years ago now), Powerade, Nestea, Dasani and most recently vitamin water producer Glaceau.

Coke’s decision to invest in Honest Tea, although unforeseen is unsurprising, given the company’s strong growth rate and increasing popularity in recent years on the one hand, and a rising demand for beverages outside the traditional soft drinks/soda industry on the other.

“In terms of sales trends, you can see there’s a large uptake in health food and beverages. In 2006 for instance, the soda, water, sports and energy drinks sector earned about 35 billion,” says Daniel Fabricant, Vice President of Scientific and Regulatory affairs at the Natural Products Association.

In fact, this is a great time to be in natural foods in general — the industry is experiencing exponential growth, having gone from $2 billion in sales in 1990 to about $55 billion at the end of last year. The explosive growth, fueled by more educated, health conscious consumers and a bigger distribution opportunity, is dragging companies like Honest Tea along with it.

Honest Tea’s own acceptance of Coke’s investment comes from a desire to reach a broader audience, according to CEO Goldman — to go from being simply “important” to acting as a “agent of change” by leading “a national shift toward healthier diets.”

“Despite our 66 percent annual compound growth rate (70 percent in 2007), we still aren’t reaching all the people we want to reach. We want to see Honest be an agent of change, not just through the example it sets but through its own actions as well,” he says.

With this deal, Goldman expects sales of Honest Tea to rise dramatically. He sees the venture as a good thing for anyone concerned with social responsibility. “The world of social responsibility should not be restricted to the smaller, more boutique companies. With things like this, more consumers will have access to social responsible products.”

Being an agent of change and an advocate of social responsibility is a long-standing goal for Goldman, who writes a blog entitled The Mission Driven Business for Inc.com. The question is whether a small company that promises to be honest, to be in favor of economically disadvantaged communities, to have a commitment to social responsibility, and to strive for “authenticity, integrity and purity, in (its) products and in the way (it) does business” is hacking away at its own brand base by agreeing to an alignment with a beverages giant like Coca-Cola.

“If we could find an investor who will help us build our business while still honoring our style of business, then that seems like an ideal scenario,” says Goldman. So is Coca-Cola really that investor?

When quizzed about the risk of doing business with a company like Coke, Goldman admits that while diluting the consumer base could be a legitimate concern, Coke is not acquiring the company, merely investing in it. “My team and I will, at least from a board governance perspective, retain control.”

He points out that Coca-Cola is diverting from its normal route by investing rather than buying, and that the soft drinks giant “understands what we’re doing and they want to buy into it…” Sounds like the idea is that Coke, while offering added resources and distribution, leaves the organic tea brand relatively untouched — at least in terms of its fundamental ethos and mode of doing business.

According to Gary Hemphill, Managing Director, Beverage Marketing Corporation, a number of failed ventures by bigger corporations to swallow up smaller companies have made the former smarter. “They’ve realized that if they’re going to acquire a smaller company whose big reason for success is its uniqueness and mission, it’s really crucial to try to retain as much of that as possible in order for the company or brand to survive and thrive.”

He cites Snapple as an example of a brand that was diluted – “they betrayed the core Snapple consumer” — by Quaker, the company that purchased it in 1994, only to sell it a short three years later. He points out that Energy Brands however, which was acquired by Coke last May, maintains a fairly independent functioning, indicating perhaps that Coke really is capable of being a participant from the side lines.

Hemphill told Fast Company that he sees no reason why Coke’s investment in Honest Tea should ruin the brand, as long as Goldman retains his position and people.

“We painstakingly built our brand with its attributes ingrained in it,” says an impassioned Goldman. “I don’t want to sound naïve, but given what we’ve been through, every consumer owes it to us to give us the chance to fail. If we do then we can be held accountable.”

Coca-Cola now becomes Honest Tea’s biggest shareholder, after a long drawn out dealing process that began in the fall of last year.

The Immoral Home of a Billionaire

Forty percent of the Forbes list of the world’s ten richest people for 2008 is occupied by Indians. That’s a significant percentage — particularly for a country in which an estimated 26 percent falls below the poverty line, a benchmark that is calculated according to the basic number of calories a person can afford to consume.

One of the notables is Mukesh Ambani, head of India’s most valuable company, Reliance Industries. Valued at $43 billion, Ambani falls fifth on the list, right under steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal. Of this sizeable fortune, he is reportedly using close to $1 billion to build a 27-storey home for himself and his family (of five) in Mumbai.

Designed by Chicago based architectural firm Perkins+Will, the building will have six floors of parking space for 168 cars (and reportedly an additional floor for the cars to be serviced in-house), a movie theatre for an audience of fifty, a health club, living quarters on four floors and three helipads. All for one family.

If you’ve ever been to Mumbai, or even if you haven’t, you likely know that tens of thousands of people live in what can pretty much be described as abject poverty. Slums and five star hotels stand shoulder-to-shoulder, beggars rap on the windows of imported Benzs, and the waiters at the city’s affluent restaurants will never afford the food that they carry.

If there are any signs of revolt, they aren’t apparent. The rich and the poor go about their business without undue hindrance or protest. Viewed by more fractious nations with some amazement, the high levels of acceptance perhaps stem from a traditional belief that the sins of previous lives impact one’s standing; good behavior in a current life will lead to a better existence upon rebirth.

So why then amongst this landscape of acceptance is Ambani’s flamboyant display of wealth worth talking about? Perhaps because in comparison with fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, Ambani’s sense of civic responsibility and moral conscience seems weak.

Unlike his father, Dhirubhai Ambani who was known for his self-made fortune and acknowledged for being something of a philanthropist, Mukesh inherited much of his current wealth and is better known for spending his money more self-indulgently (although he has set up a few hospitals and charitable institutions.) He recently bought his wife an Airbus 319, valued at $59 million, for her birthday. That the 51 year old Ambani should be using his money to do more than further his business prospects is incontrovertible, but to what extent?

In determining an individual’s moral obligation with regard to his wealth and its distribution, a famous example cited by philosopher Peter Singer comes to mind. If one sees a small child drowning in a pond upon walking by, refusing to save the child at the cost of some minor inconvenience to oneself (like ruining a new pair of shoes) would widely be deemed callous and indeed immoral. “Similarly,” writes Singer, “if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.”

Ambani’s expenditure on his new high rise could, if donated to the UNHCR, provide 2 million wells to provide safe drinking water in developing countries or provide therapeutic feeding kits to feed 100 million children. He could sponsor close to 4 million children for one year through Children’s International – providing them with food, clothing, medical care, and education support. He could fund 10 million trainee teachers in Kenya for 5 weeks through Oxfam. Instead however, he has chosen to build himself another multi-million dollar place to sleep at night.

What motivates some to donate their wealth to needy institutions? According to sociologists like Paul Schervish, the wealthy donate in order to find purpose and happiness. Others believe that philanthropy on the part of the rich is motivated by a desire to ease their consciences or generate favorable publicity. Still others speculate that the rich are propelled to give away their wealth by a sense of duty. Interestingly, the Vatican has added 7 “modern” sins to the traditional ones, one of which is being “obscenely wealthy.”

Whole Foods Takes a Stand

On Earth Day next week, the natural and organic foods supermarket Whole Foods will stop offering plastic bags to its customers. So how are you expected to carry home your granola, fruit juice, soymilk and edamame? It’s down to paper or reusable canvas bags.

In response to these laudable efforts, Jeff Stier the associate director of the American Council on Science and Health wrote a scathing article in the New York Post entitled ‘Paper Bags: Roach City.‘ According to Stier, “like other Earth Day initiatives, this move by Whole Foods reeks of a phenomenon known as ‘greenwashing.’”

Stier spends his entire piece loftily writing about how cockroaches prefer to nest in paper rather than plastic, conjuring up shudder-inducing images in his readers (the subject line in the email that I got from a coworker about his article reads “this is disgusting”), and insisting that Whole Foods should be allowing its consumers the choice of using plastic bags.

If anyone can be cajoled into taking Stier’s dramatic account seriously, we face a dire future: the nation will soon be over run by cockroaches, dog poo will line our once pristine streets, and unlined trash cans will be splattered with the remnants of leftover food.

There’s no denying that being green is a fad – and one that’s smoking hot right now. It’s cool to care and companies that don’t may act like they do in order to preempt an onslaught of bad PR. In this case though, Whole Foods’ move is far from greenwashing.

Plastic is just bad. Whole Foods has done a good thing. Yes we all reuse plastic bags, but equally, we all throw them away too after using them just once – something we wouldn’t do if the bags weren’t such an easy commodity to come by. There are tens of thousands of other stores out there still dispensing these bags and the move is integral to Whole Foods’ image as a natural foods chain. Just like it’s integral to Fast Company’s image to work in a green building. Cutting down on plastic –and this does not imply eliminating it completely right away – will not affect our lives negatively in the least.

In his defense, Stier does make several good points – that people are too eager to jump on the green bandwagon without thoroughly examining the cause they’re rooting for, that many corporations that claim to be environmentally friendly are in fact more concerned with their image than with the cause itself, and that roaches are indeed more attracted to paper than plastic. But his points fall far short of adding up to make a case against Whole Foods’ endeavor.

At a recent PSFK panel, designer Jeff Staple, who has worked on sustainable initiatives for Nike, made a compelling point about the need to encourage big firms to engage in sustainable practices. He underscores the importance of encouraging big corporations that are trying to go green and issues a caveat about the dangers of labeling their sustainable initiatives nothing more than self-indulgent publicity stunts. His co-panelist Graham Hill, the founder of Treehugger, sums it up best: “If you can turn a big ship just a little bit, it’s amazing what the ripple effect can be.”

An incisive Fast Company article this month explains the often-unexploited power of getting inertia on your side, a theory that could easily be extended to apply to the plastic-paper issue. Authors Chip and Dan Heath explain the power of the default option – when consumers have to request a change in an option, more likely than not they will be too lazy to do so.

The trick is to structure the default option to suit your cause. Using this principle, stores across the nation could cut down on the consumption of plastic without the inconvenience of complete eradication (at least until a solution to dog poo collection, cockroaches and extra trash liners has been created) by giving consumers a paper bag by default and then, if they ask for a plastic bag instead, charging them five cents for it. Some stores have already adopted policies like this, and if the inertia theory proves right, more consumers will accept the paper bags rather than deal with the hassle of scrounging around for the extra five cents.

In the meantime however, organic and natural foods stores like Whole Foods, and other retailers that have embraced the ideals of adopting environmentally friendly practices are right in eradicating the plastic bag option altogether. It’s high time one of the larger ships took a stand.