Make it easy for me to vote with my wallet

I tried and failed to do this ten years ago. The basic premise was you scanned a product barcode at a store and would get useful information back. Americans almost entirely care about price so the first module I wrote scraped Amazon and gave back the Amazon price. I wanted any number of modules to give you other information relevant to your needs. Some examples:<p>- Environmental (eg the furniture you just scanned was made from rainforest)<p>- Nationalism (eg if you call support it will be answered by someone in a different country)<p>- Manufacturer (eg pointing out another store carries all 5 colours instead of the 1 you see here)<p>- Reviews (eg metacritic scores)<p>- Social views (eg gay marriage)<p>I was hoping that price would be the least useful piece of information, and provide a way for sources of information (eg Greenpeace) to be connected to consumers who wanted to know about that for the product right in front of them.<p>Today you are still stuck with price, and in some cases reviews, and we are all the poorer for it.

"Someone needs to make a mint-like financial site that tells me when I am spending money on companies with policies that disagree with my morality or personal politics; I don’t have time to research when companies do horrible things, please help me be a better person anyways."<p>All of them. HTH.

I went to TechStars For A Day in Boulder, and somebody was making this exact iPhone app. I can't tell you what it was named, but you would basically scan any product, and it would analyze how the product's manufacturer aligned with your views, and it would suggest competitors that aligned better. Furthermore, the "bad" brand would then offer you coupons to convince you to "forgive" their wrongdoing.<p>Really, I saw it as an interesting social experiment for people &#38; companies to gauge the dollar amount a person's values were worth to him.

The problem with voting with your wallet is that the richer you are, the more times you can "vote".<p>I'd rather vote with my actual vote.

How would this work for purchase, say, at a Grocery Store? The mom and pop grocer's down the road may have no evil corporate affiliation, but the makers of the junk food they're selling - that's a different story.<p>It's so hard to pick out every little piece. As a parallel, I am a vegan, and I just have to accept that no matter how hard I try - even if I <i>did</i> have an app - I'm going to be using or ingesting animal products at some point. An app just can't take into account every little piece of the puzzle.

Yes, but... It's not so much about what I buy (though this is important), it is about how to incentivize politicians to be dependent on the people alone, not the .000042% that give 60% of the Super Pac funds.<p><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...</a>

This site is my quick and dirty start: <a href="http://dontbuytheircrap.com" rel="nofollow">http://dontbuytheircrap.com</a> But I haven't gotten around to building the tool yet. The idea is to have a mobile friendly web app that leverages social networking to help with this very problem. I didn't think there would be an opportunity for monetization. Maybe I was wrong.

I'm not sure how well-supported this product has been (the website itself seems down, if that's any indicator), but <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buy-back-your-vote/id535014326?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buy-back-your-vote/id5350143...</a> was done as a project last year in one of my university courses.

Somebody should team up with the Better World Shopper folks (<a href="http://www.betterworldshopper.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.betterworldshopper.org</a>) to make this happen. They do currently have an iOS app, but it's still way more manual work than it sounds like the author of this article is looking for.

We've set out to do just this. Our web app analyzes your spending records from Mint, lets you set issue priorities, and recommends changes. We are in private beta. Our landing page is at switchuponline.com.

GoodGuide[1] falls in this niche.<p>The iOS app works well: just pick up a product and scan the barcode.<p>1. <a href="http://www.goodguide.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.goodguide.com</a>

that's easy. minimize your purchases with mega corporations. buy more from small businesses.<p>btw, if your bank is<p>jp morgan chase<p>citibank<p>bank of america<p>hsbc<p>you should be ashamed of yourself.