camellia’s organic beauty blog

I am mortified that it has been so long since I have posted. I will blame my vacation, my annual winter funk, and the fact that I’ve been negotiating a new lease two blocks down the street from my current boutique. (Smaller space, more foot traffic). I vow to do better.

So this morning I stopped by the mega natural foods mart because I wanted to try a product I am thinking of adding to my line up. I try not to shop there because they engage in some pretty predatory/unethical business practices against their locally owned competition. In this case, they are the only store in town that carries this line, and sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do in the name of research.

Turns out the branch closest to my house doesn’t carry the line I was looking for anyway. When I asked the helpful person in the beauty department if they carried it, she asked me what I thought of the line (hereafter referred to as “Line A”). I told her Line A is really good (one of the main reasons I don’t carry it is because Mega Natural Food Mart does, and I try to stock smaller and more hard to find brands). She then asked me what I thought about Line B, which they also don’t carry in that store but are considering adding (it seemed to be a choice between A and B). I told her I think line B is overpriced, isn’t all that natural, and doesn’t work very well. She replied that “well, line B has sales reps come by all the time” and implied they would probably go with Line B because of that reason. So I am left standing there thinking, “What the heck?” If omnipresent sales reps are a main criteria for stocking one product line over another, that really makes me question whether they even think about whether the products are any good or what the ingredients are. It also reinforces the discouraging feeling that large companies that devote a lot of resources to sales and marketing are going to get more shelf space and magazine write ups, even if their products suck. (Duh.) It is pretty much what my cynical self would have expected, but somehow I was still a little surprised.

To bring my mini-rant to a close, please shop at your locally owned co-op, grocery, or organic beauty store. Or if you don’t live anywhere you can get the products you want, use a good independently owned online source rather than one of the big companies that don’t know their products and don’t support diversity in the marketplace. Mini rant is now officially over.