It is a good day when the research starts to show what many of us have been intuiting for a while - that some consumers will pay more for goods with more socially or environmentally responsible approaches.


As Ray Fisman reports in a recent Slate article, Harvard researchers Michael Hiscox and Nick Smyth studied how consumers shopped (in Manhattan's ABC Carpet store), and how their purchase decisions changed a bit, when fair labor practice certification was involved.
The results? When the certification was mentioned, sales went up, and then - get this:

"A few weeks later, Hiscox and Smyth were back in the stockroom, marking up the prices on the labeled towels and candles by 10 percent. Quite remarkably, this increase made people buy even more towels and candles (a 20 percent increase for towels and 30 percent for candles). The authors suggest this may be because the higher prices made the products' fair-labor claims more credible."
Certainly, as the article mentions, the usual customer buying from ABC Carpet in Manhattan is high-income and liberal-minded. We can't assume that middle American, middle income shoppers will necessarily behave in the same way. At least, not yet.
But, do shopping trends in urban east and west coast markets eventually emerge in the middle of the country? Hmmm.
Why do you suppose Wal-Mart is so busy working on sustainability issues in Arkansas...
P.S. The Hiscox/Smyth study is not yet published, but this link to it was published in the Slate piece.