• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

It’s getting harder to be both a good person and a wise consumer.

My parents never had this problem when I was a kid. My dad was a Ford man. Although he hasn’t driven for 10 years, he still is. If you grew up in the country, your choices were simple: You needed a pickup truck. And in the 1960s and ‘70s, there were only three choices: Ford, GMC or Dodge. For dad, the choice was Ford -- always.

Back then, brand relationships were pretty simple. We benefited from the bliss of ignorance. Did the Ford Motor Company do horrible things during that time? Absolutely. As just one example, it made a cost-benefit calculation and decided to keep the Pinto on the road even though the brand knew it tended to blow up when hit from the rear.

There is a corporate memo saying, in black and white, that it would be cheaper to settle the legal claims of those who died than to fix the problem. The company was charged for negligent homicide. It doesn’t get less ethical than that.

But that didn’t matter to Dad. He either didn’t know or didn’t care. The Pinto Problem, along with the rest of the shady stuff done by the Ford Motor Company, including bribes, kickbacks and improper use of corporate funds by Henry Ford II, was not part of Dad’s consumer decision process. He still bought Ford. And he still considered himself a good person. The two things had little to do with each other.

Things are harder now for consumers. We definitely have more choice, and those choices are harder, because we know more.  Even buying eggs becomes an ethical struggle. Do we save a few bucks, or do we make some chicken’s life a little less horrible?

Let me give you the latest example from my life. Next year, we are planning to take our grandchildren to a Disney theme park. If our family has a beloved brand, it would be Disney. The company has been part of my kids’ lives in one form or another since they were born, and we all want it to be part of their kids’ lives as well.

Without getting into the whole debate, I personally have some moral conflicts with some of Disney’s recent corporate decisions.

I’m not alone. A Facebook group for those planning a visit to this particular park has recently seen posts from those agonizing over the same issue. Does taking the family to the park make us complicit in Disney’s actions that we may not agree with? Do we care enough to pull the plug on a long-planned park visit?

This gets to the crux of the issue facing consumers now: How do we balance our beliefs about what is wrong and right with our desire to consume? Which do we care more about?

The answer always seems to be to click the buy button as we hold our noses.

One way to make that easier is to tell ourselves that one less visit to a Disney park will make virtually no impact on the corporate bottom line. Depriving ourselves of a long-planned family experience will make no difference.

Individually, this is true. But it’s exactly this type of consumer apathy that, when aggregated, allows corporations to get away with being bad moral characters.

Even if we want to be more ethically deliberate in our consumer decisions, it’s hard to know where to draw the line. Where are we getting our information about corporate behavior from? Can it be trusted? Is this a case of one regrettable action, or is there a pattern of unethical conduct? These decisions are always complex, and coming to any decision that involves complexity is always tricky.

To go back to a simpler time, my grandmother had a saying that she applied liberally to any given situation: “What does all this have to do with the price of tea in China?” Maybe she knew what was coming.