Buying Blue

Back dur­ing the ill-fated elec­tion, I remem­ber com­ing across a web site that pur­ported to show the “blue­ness” of com­pa­nies, relat­ing their polit­i­cal dona­tions ot their shade of blue or red. Last week, I thought to look for it again, and whether it is the same site or not, I found BuyBlue.org. I’ve read up on their method­ol­ogy, and while a lit­tle sim­ple (they are try­ing to expand it from solely polit­i­cal dona­tion his­tory to also include cor­po­rate prac­tices and employ­ment poli­cies) it cer­tainly is a good place to start.

And so we are. Start­ing, I mean. We won’t be able to com­pletely cut out the red (though we could if only there was a Costco in the neigh­bor­hood), we will try to min­i­mize it.

Today we bought an iPod shuf­fle for our new run­ning habit, and we bought it at Com­pUSA, a com­pany that does not give any polit­i­cal dona­tions at all. Tar­get gave $135,000 dol­lars (78% of it’s polit­i­cal dona­tions) to Repub­li­cans in the last elec­tion cycle. Best Buy gave $45,000 (100% of its con­tri­bu­tions) to Republicans.

We were shocked at Target’s sta­tus. We always thought that it was a lib­eral com­pany, what with being from Min­nesota and all. Also on the “Say it ain’t so” list: ACE Hard­ware, Krispy Kreme, Lowe’s, Pets­mart, Williams-Sonoma, Wendy’s, Petco, IHOP, Walgreen’s, and Wells Fargo.

And on the blue list, I was relieved to see: Barnes & Noble, Burling­ton Coat Fac­tory (home of Baby Depot), Cari­bou Cof­fee (which just opened up near us), Google, Jamba Juice (that one’s for you, Denny), Levi Strauss (just bought some), Linens n Things, Pan­era, Apple, Hilton, Gap, Net­flix, and Fron­tier Airlines.

So today, we spent money at Younkers (only 11% Blue, sigh), Pan­era (100% Blue, yay!), and Com­pUSA (non donat­ing) so far. Tiffany is out look­ing for some more clothes, so she may swing us fur­ther red.

I’d like to point out that a lot of Busi­ness, espe­cially the larger com­pa­nies, nat­u­rally grav­i­tate towards the con­ser­v­a­tive side of the spec­trum. That’s fine when the Pres­i­dent is a fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive. But when he is socially AND fis­cally irre­spon­si­ble, I just can’t stand by.

So we are try­ing. Money where my mouth is.