avs Online

Dodon Megapolis 2022 -tapahtumaan liittyvässä suunnittelukeskustelussa mainittiin käsite "hinta 2.0". Vanhana reilukauppa-aktiivina aloin visioimaan, mikä sitten on "hinta 1.0", ja tällainen käsite siitä sitten mielessäni syntyi.

Hinta 1.0 tai siis se hintalappu, jonka me kaupassa tuotteissa näemme, on yksiulotteinen hinta. Se on luku lukusuoralta, joka kuvaa vain sitä rahamäärää, joka kyseisen tuotteen lunastamiseen liittyy.

Ajattelin sitten kaksiulotteista hintaa. Tämä ei ole valistuneelle kuluttajalle mitenkään uusi asia vaan se vastaa englannin kielen käsitettä "value": rahahinnan ja tuotteen käyttökelpoisuuden virittämää koordinaatistoa. Länsimaisen laatumääritelmän mukaan laadukas tuote täyttää tehtävänsä, joten kaksiulotteisessa hinnassa toinen akseli on siis laatu. Laatu, kuten hintakin, voi olla negatiivinen. Siinä missä negatiivinen rahahinta on kuluttajalle yleensä hyvä asia, negatiivinen laatuakseli taas on epämiellyttävää. Akselit pitää siis huomata piirtää oikein päin, jos haluaa "normaalin" näköisen koordinaatiston, jossa yläoikealle terhakkaasti nouseva suora on positiivinen juttu.

Mutta se hinta 2.0? Se voisi olla kolmiulotteinen hinta. Kolmas akseli onkin kiintoisa, sillä minun mallissani se on japanilaisen Genichi Taguchin laatumääritelmä, joka tarkoittaa yhteiskunnallista hintaa - toisin sanoen ulkoisvaikutuksia. Tuotteen negatiiviset ulkoisvaikutukset ovat yksiulotteisessa hinta 1.0:ssa näkymätöntä kuormaa, esimerkiksi huonot työntekijöiden oikeudet tai saastuttava valmistusprosessi. Positiivisia ulkoisvaikutuksia saattaisi löytyä esimerkiksi kauneusarvoista tai vihreän teknologian piiristä ihan mitattavana luonnon puhdistumisenakin.

Monissa tuotteissa on jo kolmiulotteinen hintalappu. Laatua yritetään usein kommunikoida brändillä tai testituloksilla (Sehr Gut!), negatiivisten ulkoisvaikutusten hallintaa esimerkiksi Reilun kaupan merkinnällä tai Öko-Tex-merkillä. Valitettavasti ainoastaan se ensimmäinen akseli on täysin vertailukelpoinen tuotteiden välillä.

Eri puolilla on esitetty paljonkin erilaisia tapoja kolmiulotteisen hintalapun kommunikoimiseksi kuluttajalle ostotilanteessa. Yksi hankalista ongelmista on kuitenkin kahden mainitun laatuakselin subjektiivisuus, joka vaatii kuluttajan olevan hämmentävän tiedostava.

Customers are typically eager to share their buying habits with the supermarkets in exchange for various perks. Some supermarket chains pay cash, others resort to more abstract "points", which have the convenient property of not being regulated by any financial authority (and because of that, air miles are believed to have surpassed the almighty dollar as the largest currency in the world). Tesco, customer data-mining extraordinaires, doled out £200 million in vouchers in 2003.

I've always felt a bit creepy about this. When I hand over my loyalty card to be swiped, I often glimpse at the wares I have on the conveyor belt. Will that frozen pizza be a liability when my health insurance company is acquired by the supermarket chain? Should I toss in some carrots to bias my buying profile?

Enter Tuulia International, a company that promises to watch over your shoulder as you shop. As you swipe your loyalty card, the shopping basket contents will be automagically transferred to the ravintokoodi.fi ("nutritional code") service, and you will be billed 20 eurocents in your grocery bill. By logging in with your personal credentials, you will see how much you've sinned. The energy content, fats, sugars, everything, is laid out to you in a devastating set of statistics. If you've been good, you get small green points on the screen. Red points... thou shalt repent!

This is rather interesting as there are sure to be companies that do not want this type of computer-assisted shopping to get any easier. Candy aisles, mountains of beer, alcopop and soft drinks are carefully positioned within stores to make Man to Fall. Now these firms not only need to get your saliva dripping, they also need to somehow nullify your electronic personal life coach.

Currently, the data (and thus your opportunity for redemption) is provided retrospectively. As your trembling hand reaches out towards the 550-kilocalorie sugary bliss, the system cannot interfere. But there's a future possibility of an electronic slap on the wrist: a project called Consumerium could help. In their model, you can specify your own, personal buying criteria - whether you want to buy Fairtrade, organic, locally-sourced, healthy, lactose-free, or whatever suits your fancy. Either by reading the bar code or RFID tag, your Consumerium agent will show a traffic light style buying recommendation based on your personal preferences. You can also program the agent to send feedback to the producer.

Ravintokoodi, meet Consumerium. Consumerium, meet Ravintokoodi. You are made for each other. Now commercialise this stuff, I want to use it.

green LA girl pointed me to a cool site, Skin Deep, which is an online database on cosmetics and all the stuff that goes into them. You can type in the name of your favourite Banana Fuzzy Bath Bomb Shampoo and the site will tell you why you'll die of Banana Fuzzy Bath Bomb Shampoo related illnesses. The database concentrates all the inherent chemical badness into a handy floating-point number: 0 means you are using pure water, and 5 means that the bottle should be disposed of as hazardous waste. The EU parliament botched the REACH directive which would have, had it passed in its proper form, cleaned the market and ended the world's biggest human guinea pig experiment. No such luck, hence the need for cyber-consumerism.

Of course, a simplistic figure like this does not paint the full picture. Some people may be allergic to a certain essential oil - thus giving some badness points to products containing it - but for most people, it may be Mostly Harmless. But you're going to have to do simplifications if you want to lobby. And this site does this in an excellent way.

We Europeans have somewhat different range of products than what the site has documented, so the odds are that you're not going to find your specific hand cream there. But fear not! By inputting the INCI list from the label, the site will whip up an instant badness indicator, and if you've been real careful, the listing will be added to their database.

So. The people that know me know that I can be quite a pain to go food/cosmetics shopping with, mainly because of the perversion of reading all the small print to find out whether the product has a high animal or E666 (additive, to you non-EU-citizens) content. And this is about as good an evening program as one could invent for me. So I did an inventory of some of my current cosmetics. Following the example of the abovementioned green girl, here we go. Disclaimer: all the statements of being "worse" and the scores themselves are directly from Skin Deep's database. Sue them, not me.

(Edit: added a couple more.)

• Urtekram Mint Toothpaste: 0.4, 93 % of toothpastes are worse than this. Peppermint is the worst ingredient...
• L'Occitane en Provence Thé Vert Shower Gel: 1.7, 65 % of body wash/cleaner type products are worse than this
• Vichy Laboratoires' deodorant: 0.6, 68 % of deodorants worse than this (but this one contains one mystery chemical, a modified plant amino acid, that is so unknown that I could not find a CAS number for it, so real score may be higher)
• The Body Shop aka L'Oreal Peppermint Cooling Foot Spray: 1.5, 71 % of foot treatments are worse than this
• Zendium Classic toothpaste: 2.0, 16 % of toothpastes are worse than this. Actually this one I ought to change. It's one of the very rare ones not containing sodium laureth sulphate, though. Bummer. (As an interesting example of language problems, there's an alternative site Zendium Fagfolk.)
• Urtekram Henna Red Shampoo: 0.5, 95 % of shampooings are worse.
• Dr. Hauschka Facial Toner: 1.0, 86 % of facial treatments are worse.
• Dr. Hauschka Moisturizing Day Cream: 1.6
• Modern Organic Products C-System Finishing Paste: 3.1. Ouch. But it smells sooooo good.
• Elokuu suihkugeeli (shower gel): 0.7 - lactic acid being the worst ingredient here.

As a summary, mostly what I expected. Most of the stuff I use is really benign. Urtekram and Elokuu (Finnish brand meaning 'August') are basically just water and soap with a hint of some essential oil. I would guess that these two brands would be in the best 10 % of any product category. Also I believe that Dr. Hauschka's scores are a bit on the high side; they get a lot of score from ethanol content and of the generic "parfum/fragrance" (which can usually mean just about anything, but in Dr. Hauschka's case only means essential oils, afaik, and they list each one). I haven't been reading the labels for nothing.