Does (or should) 'Made in China/Turkey/India' etc make any difference to what you buy

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I was chatting with my mum about baby products and other stuff like clothes/shoes. She really felt strongly that I should buy British and was going off at all the UK companies that make their baby products in China.

What do you think? Do any of you stop and check where something is made before buying it? If I'm honest I never do (especially expensive products... I guess I sometimes buy British food out of choice) - but not baby products/shoes/clothes etc.

I try to buy british. But sometimes I see things I love and just have to have them. But I do feel really guilty when I read "made in vietnam" on the label etc.

that said, with things like clothes and stuff there isn't a lot of stuff that is made in britain is there?

Exactly - if you were to only buy UK produced baby stuff/clothes you would have a pretty narrow set of options!

I dont buy british because I'm supporting our economy. I try not to buy from places where stuff will have been made in a sweatshop. I dont want to clothe my kids in something another child of their age has ben making and cant go to school etc.....

I dont mind having a narrow set of options. Choosing the ethical option is more important - like I wont buy bananas if there are no fairtrade ones. There are actually quite a wide range of things like childrens clothes if you take the opportunity to search online etc.

harrisey, I definitely agree that it's best to look for fairtrade where available.

But don't you think it's an over simplification to presume that every item made in the far east was made by a kid in a sweatshop? Doesn't the fact that people have the opportunity of working (rather than scrabbling around in rubbish heaps) mean that it's a good thing that more work is going there way. In fact some people say that the more that western production goes to the far east, the more work will be available which will mean employers will have to offer better conditions/hours/pay to get the best workers (because they will have a wider choice of factories working).

i used to work for a company that designed shoes. we'd use factories in china, and factories in portugal. the conditions in china were better, the wages were proportionally higher (the reason it's cheaper is due to the vast size of the factories. more people working means bigger output and also bulk discount on materials), and the factories had living space in them which was part of the salary, so living conditions were improved.

just because something is from outside britain or europe, doesn't mean it's necessarily made in a sweatshop. best thing to do is to research your companies and their policy towards ethical trading.