Demanding better standards a consumer, then, is not only important for you, but for others. It not only helps you chart a better path forward but brings into being new standards that are absolutely essential to understand. With the following advice, we’ll consider what these metrics might be, and how you can use them to your advantage:

Sharing Your Experience

There’s no need to be immediately hostile about it, but sharing your experience is a good way to go! It encourages companies to show the behavior you expect as standard, without having to feel like you’re being irritating for doing so. 

Companies worth their salt will welcome this of course, because it gives them more data to use when making decisions, or when trying to understand what their customers want. So, responding to surveys, feedback forms, or simply calling customer services with complaints can be important. You can also publicly ask company support pages on Twitter for advice. Sharing your experience means trying to be a little more proactive in your consuming habits rather than just accepting substandard treatment as par for the course. 

Voting With Your Wallet

All the discourse in the world can make no difference at all if you’re continuing to support bad or harmful practices with your wallet. For instance, we are certain that many people had watched BlackFish, a documentary that condemns certain ‘aquatic park’ businesses in the United States quite strongly. We can be sure that some people had seen that, and decried the foul treatment of the Orcas, while also booking their family adventure there that summer. Of course, we’re not here to judge you or anyone else in the slightest. Only, we would wish to recommend that if you care about something, voting with your wallet is the most essential measure you can take. It actually makes a difference. If you do it, others will too. And then companies will take notice.

Celebrating Great Practices

Demanding better standards isn’t all about doom and gloom and fighting your battles as aggressively as you can. There are great businesses out there, helmed by ethical people trying to fight an uphill battle to secure a better standard. It’s not easy to do things in the ‘right’ way, it’s quite expensive even, which is why we must notice and encourage these practices when we see them.

Have you ever thought about why you should buy clean beauty products? Well, because it’s not only healthier for you, but for the environment, and encourages a standard of beauty care that is much better, much more natural and wholesome than that we’re experiencing now. So - surely, this is quite wonderful. What companies could you support in this adventure? How could you make it clear that this, and only this, is the kind of product you’ll be supporting from here on out? It sounds so simple, but it makes such an amazing difference. To that degree, we would heartily recommend taking the time.

Supporting Small Enterprises

Oftentimes, the best practices are found from the bottom up, not the top down. This means that supporting small enterprises can help you ensure healthy competition in an industry. If there’s always a young challenger to the throne, the King cannot be half as tyrannical as he may have wished. That metaphor works well here because it shows that even companies like Amazon, seemingly invincible, can be affected if they stray for too long and if a better alternative comes along. See how many people switched from Google to DuckDuckGo thanks to the latter’s increased dedication to end-user privacy. You can support small enterprises if you’re careful enough, and this WILL make a difference.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily demand better standards as a consumer. From sharing your experience to voting with your wallet, to supporting the visions you wish to see, the benefits are likely to move more confidently in your favor.