A miracle might be too much to ask - a textile story
Just recently I was going into a regular mass-market clothing store (for the non-regular readers: I live in Germany) because I heard that it had just re-introduced organic clothing. I was very excited to find out what they had done to put in a new organic textile line. I was pleasantly surprised being welcomed by a giant "Bio-Cotton" poster on my way in. It was impossible to ignore all the "Bio-Cotton" signs hanging around in the first 20 metres (that's about 60 feet for the readers across the atlantic :-) ) of me entering the big store. Even the public announcement system was constantly repeating the "Bio-Cotton" ad. I was quite happy to find that the prices weren't that much above the "normal" cotton clothes and I set out to buy at least one. I thought to myself "organic textile is slowly becoming mainstream" - a nice thought.
Flashback: Just a month earlier I had tried to buy organic cotton shirts in the same store. I couldn't find anything. When I asked one of the salespeople, the first response was a blank look for 2 seconds. Then they thought really hard for another 3 seconds and then guided me to this tiny shirt rack and told me "The organic shirt from the last shipment a few months ago should be somewhere in between these shirts. If you can't find anything, then we probably don't have anything." Just to be sure I asked several other salespeople - with similar responses.
Flashforward: Now when I ask about "Bio-Cotton" shirts they're more than happy to help me find the "Bio-Cotton" shirt of my choice :-). I was really happy - this might be the first small step towards pushing other mass retailers to sell organic clothing.
On my way to the cash register I found an organic bag - woohoo, I don't need to use a plastic bag. Though after I paid, something weird happened - the cashier wanted to put my COTTON BAG into a PLASTIC BAG. Oh, well, maybe it was too soon to hope for miracles :-).
