I editorialized the article title, and I realize the article is a year old. But I only just found out about this buy out yesterday.
I have been using Wild’s refillable deodorant for over 2 years. It has been great not throwing away a huge chunk of plastic, and instead tossing a small bit of cardboard into the compost. But now they are part of a mega corp.
I got my wife and daughter switched over recently, and my wife has been using their chapstick too.
My daughter found Fussy as an alternative. I saw a video showing that Fussy’s refills fit into Wild’s cases.
I will be making the switch as soon as I run out of my current stock of Wild refills.
This is what makes capitalism so insidious. The incentives it creates drive otherwise well-intentioned people to make immoral decisions.
This is why I wish we focused more on structural problems as a society. It feels easy to get stuck in looking at the superficial scale at which problems exist, without engaging with how the systems and institutions played a role in creating that reality at scale.
“This company sold out”, “this cop did something bad”, “this person committed a crime”, etc.
Why did those things happen? They’re all a part of a larger structural issue, and I think there’s limited helpfulness in engaging with it on a case by case basis beyond righting wrongs. But our outrage and efforts really need to focus on fixing the structural problems that create all these small examples within the bigger picture
Not saying that to critisize op, I get thats not the point of the post. Just sharing what’s becoming a big political realization for me as a learn more about politics and try to engage more critically with how we solve our problems :)
That’s assuming these people were well-intentioned in the first place. Capitalism also incentivizes greenwashing. It’s all about selling people the feeling that they’re making a difference, merely by being a consumer of your products, and getting them to pay a premium for it.
Heck, they may have been targeting a Unilever exit before they started the company! Serial entrepreneurs do this stuff all the time. They think of themselves as freelance marketers.
Reminds me of Marshall’s career choice dilemmas throughout How I Met Your Mother
See: zero co. Company was doing fine, then decided to completely retool everything to single use.
It collapsed about a month later.