Yes, a system called "capitalism" that works perfectly only in theory, and where bending rules creates winning conditions, and corruption is on always upward trend lines.
Companies which sell though Amazon.
Amazon uses a smart strategy of erasing the individual seller identity. Even if you already bought some item from some seller and very happy with it, you rarely would get similar item from the same seller. You usually would just get some which is first in the search, i.e. the one which makes Amazon the most profit.
If company cares about paying workers enough, your item would be more expensive, but you are still "noname" for the buyer on amazon. And now amazon would push your listing away, because it is expensive. Besides, the client will buy the cheapest option in a lot of cases.
There are exceptions though, when you more or less know what you wanna buy and from which exact company. But if you shopping for something like "massage gun" an have nooooo idea which ones are good or bad, sustanable or not - here you probably get something from the first search page with 5 star review and reasonable price. Not something from a company which cares about longevity of the product or about their workers.
And amazon workers are not living the happiest of their lives to begin with, so probably people would not shop their if the care about sustainability. People care about cheap prices and fast delivery though.
Chick-Fil-A has a lot of control about their operation.
Sellers on Amazon have minimum control. It used to be that good price and good reviews would make your item easy to find, but now you also have to pay for it in more and more cases.
There is certainly a niche catering to the handful of customers who do care, have the money to care, have enough information to care and get the opportunity to show they care by selecting the right vendor. But very often I think the consumer is just unable to care because of lacking money, lacking information or outright deception by the vendors and lacking offers from ethical vendors.
And the market unfortunately favors the non-ethical ones. Which doesn't make ethical ones impossible or non-existent, just less likely to succeed and therefore rare.
Arguably the customer doesn't have clarity on this situation here. Customers vote with their dollars and the reason they vote for these companies is because their products are relatively speaking the cheapest for some particular level of quality.
The resolution should be on the western governments to tax or fine the ever-loving crap out of companies and their products that utilize systems like this. Then the products' end prices will reflect the true cost to the consumer because any ethically-produced product of equivalent quality should be cheaper.
Not in this case. Since the non-ethical market participants are non-ethical, they tend to use non-ethical means: like hiding from or like lying to their customers about where and how their products were produced.
Therefore it is not really an informed decision of the customer that makes them successful. It rather is the lack of transparency of the market, due to the non-ethical sellers lying and regulation being too lax.
i buy the cheaper of most products because i can't tell the difference. for all i know it could be the more expensive one that is lying to me. only if i actually know that the more expensive one is genuinely better, not fake and not based on exploited labor, then i'll buy that.
