Like many other Martinites, and college students around the country, I was up at 2 a.m. and wandering Wal-Mart, Martin’s latest attempt at economic stimulation. As I was passing two older women in the Milk/Dairy aisle, one of them turned to the other and said, “isn’t it wonderful what Yoplait is doing with those Lids for Life” and I had to stop and see what the heck they were talking about.

Under the lid of each of these products is a cute little pink ribbon and a slogan of “Lids for Life” with the scenario being that you send in these cute little lids and for every lid Yoplait gets, they will donate a WHOPPING ten CENTS to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation but only up to 1.5 million dollars.

I actually had to stand and laugh at what I was seeing.

Yoplait Light Smoothies are about $1.00 each and you’d have to buy ten of these little suckers for Yoplait to donate one whole dollar. Am I the ONLY one morally offended by this stupidity? Was I the only one that thought about how underhanded this sort of thing is? At 2 a.m. in the morning – probably.

Disgusted, I put the bottle back and mentally marked “Yoplait” off my list of buyable products. Going down the cereal aisle, I saw “Strawberry Flakes” and the same cute little pink ribbon…and the same ridiculous offer of sending in three box tops and a percentage of sales would be given to “XYZ” Breast Cancer Treatment. On and on this went. Jam and jelly companies pledged a whole $.15 for every label off their product sent in, cake mixes did the same and the more I saw, the sicker it made me.

What struck me as I was noticing all of this was the same sort of mathematical reasoning that I reported on in one of my earliest columns on vegetarianism. For some reason, people will ALWAYS see the monetary side of things when all other logic fails. These companies APPEAR to be doing the “right” thing by these donations but what they’re really doing is cajoling the public into buying their product with the promise of doing “good” with the sales.

There are several things wrong with this theory.

We go back to the economic theory on this. Yoplait asks us to spend ten dollars so they can donate one dollar to Breast Cancer. This means that out of the ten million dollars spent on Yoplait Smoothies (by the proverbial 1 million Americans) that only one million gets spent on Breast Cancer Treatment – while the rest is pocketed by the “do-gooder” company that came up with this brilliant scheme.

My question is – why the pretext of “buy our product and we’ll do something good with the money”? Why not just donate a portion of your already large profits to something worthwhile? Why would you need to manipulate a person into buying MORE of your product with the lofty promise of being a decent member of society and helping those that need help?

What galls me so about this whole thing is that these companies make billions on their products and, by and large, do little to nothing with the proceeds but feed their own monster of greed. Then, they use a particular disease or cause as a way to further line their pockets and the American Sheep line up to be monetarily slaughtered!! If these companies truly wanted to be charitable, their degree of charity would NOT be based on the amount of product sold to the American consumer. It would be an act of generosity and not an act of dollars and cents.

Shame on you, you “pink ribbon bandits”. Shame on all of you!