Hello,

Would anyone be interested in a website where people can find which (Swiss) businesses are helping the local community/being responsible?

I was thinking that perhaps if people had access to a list of who is/isn't a responsible company perhaps it would help choosing where to buy from.

What do you think?

I feel it would be a total waste of time.

How would you be able to prove who is “responsible” and who not. How would this be financed? Are there similar websites in other counties??

There are many such websites, at least they purport so to do, in Switzerland:
https://www.google.com/search?ei=Ur-...4dUDCA0&uact=5

What would make yours different? If you really could find a way to filter out the riff-raff, it would, of course, be a great service, (and I'd love to be able to have it as my Go To place to start looking) but I think that'd be very hard to achieve.

I was thinking that there would different criteria for that and perhaps it could be less about "good vs bad" but more like points like "sells brands from outside CH", "It's a local business selling local products only", etc.

In terms of financed, the hosting will be paid by me (it's really peanuts) and no ads because ads suck. The website data will be open-source and people can review and submit new businesses which can be reviewed and added to the website; that way it can be a community effort rather than a one-man operation.

I am not sure about other countries, I just thought that I would love to know if a certain business is helping the local community or not when deciding where to buy something from.

First of all, that google search didn't return anything specific for me. What was the website you were looking for?

About the way to filter out, I think the most important thing is to find what people who would be interested in caring about this topic actually look for.

For example: is selling non-Swiss product a problem? Is selling ONLY non-Swiss product a problem? Is being a global multinational not located in Switzerland a reason to avoid (for some) to avoid that? Is a purely local small business better than a huge counterpart? Things like that.

Also, I was thinking of making the list open-source which can be updated and accepted after submitting the related evidence.

10 or so years ago I cared about Fair Trade. It's really hard to determine who's being responsible in first place.

Then, not sure about the legal implications of a shame list. How to ensure the information in which the decision is made is reliable? What to do in case of shop owners that disagree with the content of the site?

Finally, what made me stop caring about Fair Trade. There's always the risk of becoming one of the irresponsible business/organizations......remember the time Yelp got several lawsuits for being an extortion racket? Every time I see a new goodness label I can't stop thinking about this https://www.theatlantic.com/business...racket/346166/

Isn't there a referendum on this coming up soon...

it's a good idea, thanks, I would be interested.

Ethical investment is increasingly popular and many companies do it. Also many people only want to work for or buy from with ethical / responsible companies.

Swiss people! Only buy Swiss bananas!

A good joke.....but they do exist https://www.tropenhaus-frutigen.ch

A good idea, but I don't think it would really work as people's opinions can be subjective. I work with some artisans that do great and cost effective work, yet some others say they would not touch them at all.

Why would they not touch them at all?

These are all great points and I understand that it can/will be quite a complex issue but I also don't want to just "suck it up" and just buy from Amazon to be done with it.


The idea is to have a collective effort, so if I do some research and find that company X is actually a pretty good/bad company, I would have a place to share such research and results with other people.

Ethical consumer (ethicalconsumer.org) does something like this for worldwide brands, with a focus on UK.


They do give opinions like "recommended", "boycott" with details for some major brands. But for most companies, they list out all the publicly available sources for irresponsible behavior by the company (e.g., poor/harmful working conditions, activities bad for the environment, animal cruelty, tax avoidance, etc).


It's not about giving a good/bad verdict, but about giving enough resources for you to make decisions yourself. I would be interested to see a Switzerland focused list!

This, this, and this.

You really need to research Swiss law. Hopefully one of the EF legal-eagles will be along with a better explanation, but generally one has to be very careful when publishing negative commentary.

If you go this route, perhaps best to focus only on positive recommendations.

Well, one good step is to stop buying from Amazon directly and also from unaccountable 3rd party sellers.

As melloncollie mentioned, focusing on positive reviews is safer from the legal point of view. NGOs that go full war on unethical business have a large legal budget.

That wouldn't be a problem then. Also to me is more interesting to know where to buy from rather than where not to buy from.


I see some interest but also there are some things that definitely need to be decided ahead of time about the approach.