Just thinking aloud here. Shops in France and Britain rely heavily on both (1) the Christmas season, and on (2) the sales season. The nine o'clock news will often broadcast interviews of shopkeepers expressing their feelings about how good (or how bad) the season has been for them. Those two periods of the year really make or break their yearly income.
What's more, the general public generally resents Christmas consumerism anyway. So if we start off at the same time as the Christmas Carols with a well-planned campaign of recruiting the general public to the "I don't buy this shit" cause, that would really annoy the retailers, i.e. force them to pressure their suppliers into implementing standards.
I would have been in favour of warning them in advance in a friendly letter, the point is not to damage their sales, it is to get them to re-think their value chains. Still that would just give them plenty of time to come up with their own glossy propaganda.
Alternatively, they could just come up with a grossly overpriced fairtrade line of products in which their profit is even more substantial than on mainline products. This means that the value chains are not tilted one bit in favour of the producers and "Fairtrade" remains an expensive luxury, not the norm.
There was an old post on Mark von Steenwyk's blog on which the ever-inspired Espiritu Paz commented that a real solution could be to create a whole Fairtrade Wal-Mart. That would be mint of course, because everyone would just end up shopping there. Can't we get some entrepreneurial genius to do just that?
In Britain, lots of folks are buying fairtrade tea and coffee, and even the right-wing tabloids have started attacking The Gap every second week or so. Maybe we're ready for a bit of action here. Obviously, I would have to think some more about this, and about who will end up being affected. I just re-read Zola's Germinal, so I'm erring on the side of caution.
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