[Advanced] Capitalism With a Conscience (1)

Trend-setting Millennials encourage retailers to embrace kindness and do more good
by Bruce Horovitz / © 2013, USA Today. Distributed by McClatchy Information Services.

At a handful of Panera locations, down-and-out folks pay only what they can afford. Nordstrom recently opened a test store where all profits go to charity. Starbucks has three coffee shops where a big chunk of the money made helps the needy. This isn't capitalism gone wacko. It’s capitalism with a conscience.

No longer the exception
For decades, this kind of corporate kindness was the exception, but in the past few years, dozens of America’s biggest brands have embraced socially kind deeds as an effective way to sell themselves to consumers, employees, even stockholders. Some are listening to their hearts—while others are listening to social-media chatter and creating consumable spin.

In either case, there is one audience that’s watching closely: Millennials. This trend-setting, if not free-spending group of 95 million Americans, born between 1982 and 2004, live and breathe social media and are convinced that doing the right thing isn’t just vogue, but mandatory.With nearly a third of the population driving this trend, kindness is becoming the nation’s newest currency.

“Companies can’t hide any more,” says Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s. Because everything they do becomes social-media fodder, he says, “forward-looking companies are starting to do less bad—and more good.”

Moving in the right direction
But it’s no longer just outliers such as Ben & Jerry’s and Whole Foods doing the right thing. More likely sooner than later, corporate kindness that doesn’t have its origins in the public relations or human resources department may become as common as coupons. Even in a dicey economy, kindness sells.“Millennials who got burned by the recession feel a resentment to consumerism, but have few alternatives,” says Robbie Blinkoff, a consumer anthropologist. “They had to create one: Love one another.”

Not love in the ’60s, hippie sense, but love in the show-me-what-you’re-doing-for-others sense.Some are doing it at ground level. Some are making genuine, company-wide efforts.


capitalism n.
an economic and political system in which businesses belong mostly to private owners, not to the government

wacko n.
/ˈwækoʊ/
a person who is crazy or very strange and unusual


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