Here is an interesting article by an economist about the multiple factors that go into a retail purchase other than price and quality.
The author lists a number of current concerns such as vegetarianism, global impact, local sourcing, obesity elements, union made, packaging issues, trans fats, nutritional information, and so on ad infinitum.
I was one of the key founders of the socially responsible investment movement. I was shocked, over the years, at the increasing number of business requirements that were made upon retail products by Lefty socially-responsible-activists. They expected corporations to adopt all of their ideological nonsense at the administrative level and build it into the products they put on the market.
When the enviro-socially-responsible campaign started out I was supportive. We wanted women on the boards of directors and aggressive minority hiring within the companies. Forty years ago.
The movement lost me very quickly when they started adding new areas of socially responsible corporate behavior. They started including opposition to animal testing, making demands on working conditions of overseas suppliers, ranting about the ratio of CEO pay to average employee's wages, demanding measurement of environmental uses of energy and all other resources. The list goes on and on and on. Of course some people believe in this crap, ranging from GMO products to organic anti-pesticide issues and of course there are products on the market that catered to goofballs.
Commerce is there to cater to everyone who can pay for the product and that includes environmental Lefty goofballs.
It must be hard to teach economics when every student knows that supply and demand is not determined by scarcity of products or the price intersection of two lines.