Wouldn’t it be great if you could tell hubby that you’re shopping to make the world a better place? Well, you can if you buy from ethical retailers.

Ethical shopping doesn’t have to mean wearing veggie shoes teamed with untailored hemp clothing. Ethical shopping means choosing to buy from retailers that use ethical practices.

Do they:

• give their employees a fair wage?
• buy from manufacturers that give their employees a fair wage (don’t give me any of that “we didn’t know” business)?
• stay far, far away from using child labour?
• refrain from animal testing?
• use methods of manufacturing and waste disposal that are safe for both humans and the environment?
• have an environmental or recycling policy?
• use readily available and easily renewable materials?

An oft cited example of an ethical retailer is BodyShop. They have milked their green, animal loving, fair trade credentials for all they’re worth and rightly so. People are generally willing to pay a bit extra in order to feel good about what they buy (the lovely smells coming from the shops don’t hurt either).
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We just barely made it through the January sales with its huge queues and confusion about which line we were supposed to be in – the normal one, the sale line or the one with those returning unwanted Christmas gifts.

Now that the sun is starting to shine and the flowers are blooming it will soon be time to face the next battle: the summer sales.

Although nowhere near as bad as the battlefield we see just after Christmas, the summer sales can be tricky to negotiate. You won’t need quite as much armour but a good thick skin wouldn’t go amiss. Here’s some tried and proven tactics to help you win the battle and bag that bargain.

Keep your eyes open for which shops are doing sales and when. Not all open their summer sales at the same time, although they usually do it within a week or so of each other.
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You can buy a bra in any high street shop, from any catalogue shop and most online clothing stores. That’s not the hard part. The difficult part is knowing which one to pick.

There are a wide variety of styles to choose from, each one claiming to do something fantastic and some of them actually doing it.

The Wonderbra for example is indeed wonderful. Although some of the styles just don’t work for me and actually seem to do the opposite of what they’re supposed to.

Could this be because I’m wearing the wrong size? Maybe. It could also be because everyone wants something different and nowadays there are at least 50 bras in various colours to cater for any task.
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It’s just not fair. I see my sister in law having a fantastic time buying pretty dresses, tops, skirts and outfits in pink, yellow and lilac for her little girl and all I get to choose from are shorts, trousers and t-shirts. And it’s all brown, black, grey and green. BORING!

It’s bad enough in the high street stores but try buying clothes for boys on eBay and you realise that there are some categories that don’t have 5000 sellers. I can find over 1000 dresses in my niece’s size selling today which is only slightly less than the total amount of items listed in boys for my son’s size.

And you can forget car boots or charity shops. By the time an item of boys clothing hits the tarmac it’s been so well worn it’s not much good for anything. This is in stark contrast to girls clothes which can often be passed down to several sisters before wearing out.

On and offline, new or used – the choice for boys clothes is strictly limited.

So what can you do? Well, first of all it bothers me more than him that all he has is track suits, shorts, t-shirts and school uniforms. He actually likes it that way and is more than happy to wear the same thing again and again. I would expect that a lot of boys feel the same. And this is probably why there isn’t the huge range of styles and colours for boys as there is for girls. There simply isn’t the demand.
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