As I walk through the Emmaus Farmers Market in the Triangle with my mom, I get a great sense of community. Local businesses come together to sell their products to the people of Emmaus and we aimlessly throw our money to them, because after all, they’ve worked really hard.

And there’s no doubt about that. Small businesses work tremendously harder than big corporations, like Target or Amazon.

So imagine my surprise when my mom and I walk to the sustainable-based food vendor, Zekraft, to get a salad and see that they are selling a new product: coffee. My mom and I look at each other and then to the cup of coffee she’s holding in her hands, and back to each other. Zekraft had broken the rule.

At the Emmaus Farmers Market, there are so many diverse vendors. From B.A.D Farm Dairy Products to Little Miss Korea, the Emmaus Farmers Market is home to many beloved vendors and their products. However, I have always thought there was one unspoken rule of the Emmaus Farmers Market: no taking from other vendors’ specialties.

If you sell meat, and another vendor does too, that’s fine. Your business is your business, and theirs is theirs. But if you’re a business that exclusively sells protein shakes and there is a business whose only product is fruit snacks, and out of the blue you start selling fruit snacks, that’s not right. You’re taking from another business, and that’s a problem.

We all know how big corporations are. They take from the small businesses and sell those products as their own, and we tend to buy from them. This leads small businesses to get the short end of the stick, and the small businesses already tend to suffer more. However, no one ever really talks about how these big corporations came to be. They all started out as small businesses.

Most large corporations don’t play clean, but that doesn’t mean that all small businesses do. If small businesses take and take from other small businesses, they’re no better than large corporations.

I thoroughly enjoy Zekraft and its products. I love that they’re a sustainable and farm-grown company. However, I do think that their sustainability quirk not only helps the planet but also their sales. We’ve come to live in a world where being sustainable is a lifestyle, an aesthetic you should strive to be, not because it’s good for us and the planet, but because it makes us look good. While I love that because it helps the planet, to what point are we buying the salad to actually help our planet and buying a salad to show off, parading around our aesthetically pleasing product to rub it in everyone’s faces, screaming in their ears how great we are because of it.

I believe that we as customers need to stop blindly throwing our money around and open our eyes. We need to stop being so focused on the aesthetics of a product and realize when something is genuine and not just branded to please our rose-colored glasses. We need to take responsibility as customers and aim when we throw our money – because let’s face it: we make or break businesses.