Why Shop? Week, Sunday, November 19 through Saturday November 25, 2000, hasbeen organized by Women's Studies students at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Their mission is to inform consumers about how purchases affect women globally. Instead of shopping indiscriminately from November21 - 27, consumers are urged to make ethical purchasing decisions by boycotting companies that exploit women and children; demanding corporate accountability for global working conditions; and consuming less this holiday season--as well as in the future. Consumers can also choose to participate in Buy Nothing Day on the day after Thanksgiving, the traditional beginning of holiday shopping.  When shoppers practice ethical consumption, they can begin to establish new patterns of social justice that value economic and political equality, as well as environmental sustainability.

Why Shop? Week initiates an international call to action regarding women's rights from a worldwide perspective. Why Shop? Week raises consumer awareness of women as global producers of goods and services and as reproducers who fill social and familial needs. Although most women work a double day both inside and outside the home, they lack access to the majority of the world's resources: the Wall Street Journal estimates that women perform 60% of the world's labor, but earn only 10% of the world's income, while the United Nations assesses women's unpaid labor at 16 trillion dollars annually.

 Women's exclusion from policy-making roles further allows their exploitation in a transnational economy. As consumers, women in the developed (or overdeveloped) world make decisions which have the potential to exploit or empower other women. Why Shop? Week asks consumers to demand women's equal opportunities through economic and political activism. The Platform for Action adapted at the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing reflects a new international commitment to counting women's work. Together women can build global alliances which benefit all of us across national boundaries.

Retailers and manufactures alike pocket enormous profits while consumers and workers pay the price. The average wage for Indonesian workers in the U.S. footware companies such as Adidas, Nike and Reebok is only twenty cents per hour. Haitian workers sewing clothes for Disney earn as little as $1.00 per day. Garment workers in U.S. sweat shops reportedly work sixteen hour a day, seven days a week, without any employee benefits. Young women in electronic industries are considered dispensable by their employers, and many lose their sight after two years of peering through microscopes.
 

During Why Shop? Week, the organizers ask that consumers use their economic strength to empower women worldwide. "I don't want to buy products that exploit others," states Emily Johnson, a spokesperson for Why Shop? Week. She and the other organizers recommend that during this year's frenzied holiday shopping period, consumers give a gift to women worldwide by asking, "Who needs it? Who makes it? Who profits from it?" before they purchase another wasteful, unnecessary, or exploitative product that profits some at the expense of others.