© Jörg M. Colberg :
(March 22, 2001)
"One of the best books I've read in a long time"
It never really occured to me how much the world had been changing over the past decade or so. "Suddenly", everybody was crazy about Ralph-Lauren shirts and Nike shoes. I never really liked that but I didn't care. I also didn't really care much about all the sweatshop issues people were bringing up because I thought I wasn't buying into the whole thing anyway. Over the past couple of years I got more interested in the changes, though. Starbucks coffee shops are growing faster than mushrooms and neighbourhoods are Gap-ified. I find that pretty disgusting but I didn't know anything about what was going on behind the scenes. Therefore, when I picked up Naomi Klein's "No Logo" I was pleasantly surprised to get a plethora of information about all that stuff. I can't praise Mrs. Klein enough for the work she must have put into the book. It is highly informative, fun to read, and it is nice to discover the writer herself behind many of the stories in there. So in the end, I got the information I was looking for and much more. I learned how Starbucks pushes little coffee shops out of neighbourhoods by offering to pay more rent for the very places the coffee shops are in, I learned about Nike and its now infamous sweatshop system etc. etc. The other day, I went to "Macy's" and I couldn't resist to look at the tags of the sweaters there. Made in Indonesia, Honduras, ... you name it. I was disgusted and I left. Reading the book might disgust you. But you'll get an excellent idea of what's going on and what you can actually do to counter Starbucks and all the other brand predators.