Every time a customer buys a product, the organization gives the same type of product to the disadvantaged for free which is a form of donation. Hence, one product brought by the customers means one product given to a needy person for free. Toms is the innovator for this business model where it wanted to socially change the way a business operates by helping every unfortunate person by providing them with free shoes. Toms might have clear intentions of actually making a change in the society but to is it actually solving socio-economic issues?
This is highly debatable and in my opinion “I am opposed to the ‘one for one’ business model because” this model is only giving away resources to the disadvantaged but it does not show them how to effectively use them to their advantage. Giving away a pair of shoes will help children and adults avoid injuries, run away from any disease but it does not eradicate the disease which is required to actually bring a social change. What Toms is doing by giving a free pair of shoes is equivalent to giving a pain killer. The pain killer helps in temporarily abolishing the pain but it is not solving the actual problem.
At the same time by giving away free shoes, Toms is creating barriers for local businesses who make shoes because anyone would naturally prefer getting a free pair of shoes instead of buying a pair. This leads to local firms running out of business and this is an obstacle for the economy to grow.
Looking at the consumer’s point of view, they would support Toms because of the feel good factor of doing something for the society but looking deep it can be seen that this model can fail on this factor because it is easy to replicate the one for one business model and this way Toms can lose its customers to another competition based on the same business.
The “one for one” business model is more of a marketing campaign to attract new customers and it completely contradicts the idea of how the model can bring social change because it is actually not changing the social equilibrium but just giving away donations which can easily be misused or be ineffectively used.
