I am all about boycotting any company that doesn’t feel ethical to me. I was happy boycotting Taco Bell—a restaurant with lots of vegetarian options that I love so much—when they didn’t pay their tomato workers fairly. Boycotting Kimberly-Clark until they agreed to get their materials from another source rather than the old growth forests they were helping decimate. While I hate that companies don’t always act out of their own conscience and it takes us refusing to buy from them—and giving them bad press—to get them to make ethical changes, I do love that we, as consumers, do have the power to help things change.

Take Target, for example. I stopped buying from one Target store—not the whole chain, just one store—when I learned that the pharmacy there refused to fill a woman’s order for birth control. We didn’t buy from that store very often; they are in the next town to us and not our local store. But we did shop there occasionally and now we will not.

Now, Target is definitely not a perfect company; they have their share of environmental, labor, and other concerns. But where I live, your choices are Target and Wal-Mart; we don’t have any small independent stores left. To me, Target is the lesser of two evils, and that’s why I choose to shop there. I don’t like it, but it’s that or travel and waste gas every time we need dish soap. Target has recently come under fire, however, for providing $150,000 in support for a candidate who is anti-gay rights, anti-immigration, and generally against everything I stand for—Tom Emmer of Minnesota. I do not like this decision on the part of the store and do not like the idea of my money potentially funding such politicians.

However, if I don’t shop at Target, where do I have left to do? We do have a Dollar Tree, but we’re already boycotting them because of a labor dispute. (We never cross a picket line.) The grocery store does have most of the things we need, but not all of them. Target also carries the eco-friendly Method brand that I prefer. Maybe we can try to use more homemade stuff to stay away from Target for a while and see how that works.

If anything, I will definitely be writing to Target to express my concern about their philosophy. Will you be writing to Target or boycotting the company? You can learn more about the issue and sign a petition against the company here.