Cause marketing such as this allows companies to wrap themselves in a rosy cloak of self-aggrandizement. It's a lot of froth and icing.
This pink business is a huge boon to corporations, while potentially less of one to the 2.5 million women living with breast cancer, or the more than 40,000 whom the disease kills each year. A donor can do more good contributing directly to a charity.
I'm not immune to the therapeutic properties of shopping, but it seems insulting that breast cancer charities invite us to consume our way to the cure.
We don't shop for prostate cancer. Still, men are aware of the risks, the need for screening.
Breasts are huge in the cancer world, precisely due to all this pink. The movement, dominated by Susan G. Komen for the Cure - $1.5 billion donated since 1982 - has "become the envy of every other outfit on the planet," says Penn bioethicist Arthur Caplan.
When I ask Lankenau radiation oncologist Marisa Weiss, founder of BreastCancer.org, how she feels about October's shopathon, she sighs and says, "Oy," not once but twice.
"I have mixed feelings. They've cleansed and marketed this disease, putting bows on a very ugly, dangerous disease that can ravage many women in the prime of their lives," Weiss says.
"But it has also served the ability to talk about it, for women to feel more connected and not so alone," she says. "Pink takes away some of the horror and the shame and the stigma."
Breast cancer is "a much more complicated disease than most other cancers," Weiss says, involving multiple factors and risks.
It can't be linked to heredity, or one set of behaviors, as smoking is to the majority of lung cancer cases. "Progress is measurable. There are drops in mortality rates. I've been amazed by the advances, but also frustrated by the lack of progress."
