Real Vegans Boycott Payless: Open Letter to _______ Magazine* April 21, 2009

Dear _______:

Way back on December 30, I contacted you to express my disappointment about your decision to not only include Payless in a list of vegan-friendly apparel retailers, but to place the company at the top of the list as well. You have yet to acknowledge my letter, let alone respond.

Payless is NOT an appropriate choice for anyone with ethical or environmental concerns (moreover, in the future it won’t be an option for anyone who shuns leather either). They commit design theft left and right. They are a longtime user of sweatshops. The crappy vinyl they use for shoe uppers is highly unlikely to biodegrade at all (quality faux leathers can be 30-100% biodegradable). Their goods require frequent replacement due to their low quality, which generates much more waste (and uses more energy) than buying good-quality faux-leather shoes, which can last for years with proper care.

Earlier in the very same issue, you ran an article about labor practices in the food industry [title deleted].  While I applaud you for drawing attention to the importance of fair-trade agriculture, I must protest the inherent hypocrisy in supporting Payless. You don’t approve of the cocoa industry exploiting African children, yet you won’t extend the same compassion to factory workers, the majority of them teenage girls, in Southeast Asia (many of whom are beaten or groped by supervisors, denied restroom breaks, housed in overcrowded firetrap dorms, fined for everything under the sun, fed amphetamines to stay awake for forced overtime shifts, and paid so little they are lucky if they can afford two meager meals per day).

Being vegan is about reducing suffering. Sweatshop labor is inherently not vegan. Your list should have been composed entirely of ethical companies. I myself have offered to cover the fashion beat for you in the past, and not to toot my own horn or anything, but I could have come up with a far better list of leather-free shoe companies. If a mere shopkeeper (with a fashion background and a few published articles under her belt) isn’t good enough to write for _______, fine, but at least assign fashion-related articles to writers who are actually knowledgeable about truly vegan fashion.

Incidentally, cheap shoes do not offer sufficient support or air circulation. Cheap shoes are the high-fructose corn syrup of the footwear trade – they seem like a good idea to uninformed consumers at first, but only later do they realize their unhealthy mistake.

If you are going to present yourselves as an ethical veg*n publication, you must be 100 percent consistent! Mistakes like this are precisely the sort of thing that causes omnivores to write off herbivores as animal lovers who hate people. While I will openly admit to cracking the occasional joke about people being no damn good, I would never knowingly support such a cruel and immoral industry. Furthermore, I certainly don’t want to be lumped in with people who call themselves veg*n but don’t give a damn whose rights they spit upon in the pursuit of a well-stocked closet.

I’ve spent the past three years trying to convince certain apathetic self-proclaimed veg*ns why they should care about sweatshop labor, and in one fell swoop you unraveled my work by telling my target market Payless was “okay” (which it quite clearly is not). I am not going to ask you for compensation or anything like that (I’m the Vegan Shoe Lady, you know). I just want you to tell your readers you made a mistake.

Sincerely,

The Vegan Shoe Lady

P.S. Dear Readers – here’s the original letter:

Dear Editor,

Words cannot describe how shocked I was to see Payless topping the list in your [title deleted] sidebar from the January/February 2009 issue. Payless may offer some wares that contain no leather, but they are not an appropriate choice for anyone with environmental, ethical, or animal-rights concerns.

Payless shoes are extremely cheap because they are made with extremely cheap materials and are assembled as cheaply as possible. The company is well-known for using sweatshop labor. It’s true that they pulled out of one abusive factory several years ago (following an investigation by Chinese labor officials), but it is highly unlikely that Payless will ever really pay its factory workers a living wage. Having a basic understanding of apparel manufacturing, I can tell you that it is, in fact, fiscally impossible to fairly compensate workers and still profitably produce a shoe that will retail for $20. Being vegan is supposed to be about reducing, and hopefully eliminating, suffering. Given that you ran an article addressing labor issues in the food industry [title deleted] earlier in this very issue, I find the mention of Payless incredibly inappropriate.

Because Payless’ shoes are haphazardly assembled from cheap materials, their level of quality is hardly ideal, and they require much more frequent replacement than a higher-quality vegan shoe. The cheap plastics they use aren’t going to biodegrade anytime soon, and when cheap shoes wear out, they take up landfill space. Frequently-replaced shoes take up a LOT more landfill space than a well-made pair that will last for years.

Incidentally, “cheap” shoes aren’t always so good for your wallet. (Not too long ago, in my blog, I compared and contrasted two people; one wearing only cheap shoes, one wearing only good ones. Because cheap shoes wear out so quickly, the person who wore only cheap shoes wound up paying more than twice as much over a 10-year period.) Also, cheap vinyl shoes lack proper structure and do not breathe. I personally would prefer that the veg*n community NOT be known for stress fractures and sweaty, malodorous feet.

Please, _______, help your readers to do the right thing. Why not encourage them to support ethical companies, preferably run by people who truly understand what “vegan” means?

Sincerely,

The Vegan Shoe Lady

P.P.S. I wish Laura Little had photographed me for the store’s early press coverage.

*Name (and article titles) omitted, but it’s not hard to figure out.