United States | BuyPartisan

Voting with your wallet

An app that brings partisan rage to the grocery store

|WASHINGTON, DC

PURITANISM, wrote H.L. Mencken, is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” Half a century later, the prissiest Americans are haunted by a different fear: that they may buy cheese made by someone whose opinions they do not share. To help people avoid this calamity, a new app called BuyPartisan reveals whether any given product is made by Republicans or Democrats.

Using an iPhone’s camera, it scans the barcode and reports back on the ideology (as measured by donations to political parties) of the directors and staff of the company in question. Obsessive partisans can then demonstrate their commitment to diversity by boycotting firms with which they disagree. “We vote every day with our wallets,” trills an advert.

Latte-sipping, iPad-toting liberals will be relieved to hear that the directors of Starbucks donated five times as much to Democrats as to Republicans; those of Apple gave 30 times as much. But some results are surprising. For example, when The Economist tested the app, it said that the directors of the Quinoa Corporation, which sells “organic gluten-free quinoa pasta” to the NPR-listening classes, donated almost entirely to the Republican Party. For some consumers, that would spoil the taste, if it were possible to make quinoa taste worse. But it turns out that the app is not always accurate--the Quinoa Corporation says that the directors identified by the app have nothing to do with it.

BuyPartisan’s maker, Spend Consciously, was founded by a former Capitol Hill staffer, Matthew Colbert. He is cagey about whether he is a Democrat or a Republican, but hopes that the app will eventually include data on things like how firms treat their employees. It has caused a stir in Washington, where political junkies have had fun testing whether their favourite snacks are red or blue. But will it affect American shopping habits?

For shoppers with jobs, children and limited spare time, probably not. A mother with a baby strapped to her chest in a Safeway supermarket in Washington explains why. The idea of scanning every sausage or toilet roll for its political affiliation is “just crazy”, she says. “If I want to eat gummy bears, I will eat gummy bears. I don’t care if they’re Republican.” For some products, there is no obvious alternative. Democrats whose cars run out of petrol, for example, will probably fill up at the nearest petrol station, even though oil firms donate mostly to Republicans.

Republicans and Democrats do have different shopping habits, observes Vishal Singh, an academic who studies marketing at NYU Stern. Republicans tend to drink more American beers; Democrats more foreign and craft brews. In Republican-voting districts Cracker Barrel, a southern-themed restaurant, is common; upscale Whole Foods shops cluster in Democratic areas. But this mostly reflects the different lives Democrats and Republicans lead. Southern food is popular, unsurprisingly, in the South, which is heavily Republican. Costly groceries are popular with affluent urbanites, who tend to be Democrats.

Some firms are straightforwardly politicised. On September 8th religious conservatives mourned the death of Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick Fil-A, whose son’s public opposition to gay marriage prompted boycotts of the family’s fried-chicken joints. But most firms are just trying to make a buck, and most shoppers are just looking for dinner.

Correction: When we used the BuyPartisan app to assess the political leanings of the Quinoa Corporation, it rated the firm Republican. The Quinoa Corporation assures us that the app is wrong. This article has been amended to reflect this.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Voting with your wallet"

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