Oceans Pay the Price for Costco's Seafood

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Now that Trader Joe’s has agreed to sustainable seafood policies, Greenpeace has bigger fish to fry. Costco is the new baddie singled out by the environmental nonprofit for selling endangered, red-list fish, including orange roughy and Chilean sea bass. According to Greenpeace, Costco sells 15 of 22 red-listed seafood items—while telling its shareholders and customers that it supports sustainable seafood!

Greenpeace’s goals for this campaign are similar to its successful campaign against Trader Joe’s—but not quite as fun to write about from a blogger’s perspective. Why? Well, the old “Traitor Joe’s” campaign was just so smart and cute! The Traitor Joe spoof website snarkily welcomed visitors to its “one-stop-shop for ocean destruction.” And somewhat like the hilarious fake BP public relations Twitter account @BPGlobalPR, Greenpeace’s @traitorjoes Twitter account (now defunct) featured a pirate avatar wearing a Trader Joe’s Hawaiian shirt plus a black eyepatch, tweeting evil in character with lots of arghs thrown in about how much he loves eating red-list fish.

In contrast, the Costco campaign—dubbed Oh-No-Costco—is a lot more sedate. The site has a semi-entertaining “Ocean Destroyers Anonymous” video, in which Traitor Joe’s reads a poem about his new sustainable seafood policies and Costco plays hooky to go buy endangered Chilean sea bass. But beyond that, all the text is pretty sincere, detailing Greenpeace’s position and Costco’s flunky status when it comes to sourcing sustainable seafood. And saddest of all, the campaign has no evil pirates!

Greenpeace activists have already visited Costco’s headquarters to protest (no fish costumes this time) and spoke with Costco Corporation President Craig Jelinek. Since Greenpeace has already netted a success with Traitor Joe’s, I’m hoping that the Oh-No-Costco campaign will succeed quickly—despite the lack of orange fish costumes and snarky tweeting pirates. Costco shoppers can quickly send a letter urging the company to adopt sustainable seafood policies at Oh-No-Costco.

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