I received an email from Linkshare this morning. I use Linkshare as one of the ways to hook up with affiliate programs. In this morning’s email, Linkshare said, “Mother’s Day is around the corner and we’ve accumulated hundreds of Banner and Text Links in time for Mother’s Day. Don’t miss these featured Seasonal opportunities including Home and Gardening offers and a collection of featured Green Advertisers.” The bit about “Green Advertisers” piqued my interest, as you can imagine. Geez, if this is true, it’s going to save me a lot of work looking through their lists of advertisers!
So I clicked the included link to so-called green advertisers and looked at the list.
Parks Seeds. Hmm, seems I remember seeing that name before. So I did the research and found out it’s a Monsanto-owned seed company.
Organic clothing. Sounds good! Click the link and it’s Nordstrom, and organic clothing is a VERY small part of what they have to offer.
The next one? “Saks Fifth Avenue Green House Collection, Home of Eco-Smart Style” which is, again, a ridiculously small part of what Saks offers.
Most of the list was similarly flawed.
One of the last ones made me break out in an actual GUFFAW! “Help the environment without hurting your budget with every day low prices on hundreds of Earth-Friendly products at Walmart.com”
Now, I’ve found Linkshare to be a good and fair company. I highly suspect they didn’t “police” their advertisers to see if they were really green, but instead went on the word of the advertiser, or some intern or marketing person did a simple search for the term “green” and just slammed together that page without knowing how ludicrous it was. They might want to rethink that in future, before they send out these emails, in my humble opinion.
And if I were lazy or uncaring I’d just include all these programs. After all, I do make a buck if you buy from a Walmart affiliate link, right? But that’s just not me, and it’s not what this site is about. Saying you’re green doesn’t make you so. Selling a few sustainable and responsible products amongst all the rest of the third-world produced petrochemically created crap shipped from the other side of the planet does not make you green either. This is called GREENWASHING. And you should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Now, that doesn’t mean that Walmart shouldn’t get kudos when they do something that’s actually a good thing, like their recent move to put solar panels on the roofs of Walmart stores, but sheesh, saying that you’re a green corporation simply because you did a few dozen good green things among millions of earth-unfriendly decisions and items for sale just isn’t . . . kosher.
And if you’re curious about Linkshare *, check it out.
The few good programs in that list will eventually be represented in the Green Goods Directory.
