Dear TOMS,

Your shoes are everywhere. Congrats!

Your ability to ask shoe lovers to link their wallets to social causes is genius. And yet, these emotional appeals for consumers to consider the company more socially ‘responsible’ just shows how far companies are willing to go to finagle those hard-earned dollars and euros out of Western wallets filled with guilt.

Your customer could easily go to someone whose shoes are probably better looking and better priced, but wait, here’s the avuncular: TOMS to the rescue of little developing world feet.

TOMS shoes goes to poor parts of the world and takes snapshots of the CEO, Blake Mycoskie, (in the TOMS avuncular vernacular, also known as the ‘Chief Shoe Giver’) kneeling at the feet of unsuspecting young “Third Worlders.” As the quintessential shoe salesman, he clearly also has other ideas to sell — one of his tag-lines is “Every person who wears our shoes becomes a marketer of our shoes.”

As well-intentioned as this marketing campaign appears to be, I have to say, as a “Third Worlder,” I am bothered.

Bothered by companies that use someone else’s poverty to sell products.

Bothered at the notion that those adorable little faces may have no idea that their images will be splashed across glossies around the world, to sell shoes.

If you wanted these children to have shoes, you would, in the words of another shoe company, just do it. How about “We’re TOMS, buy our shoes. Sometimes we donate some to poor brown children. End of story.”

Wouldn’t it be better to spend time making these children’s lives better? Give them the shoes, but also make donations to build better schools, or build them yourself. What makes more sense? Better schools, access to clean water, and health facilities or another pair of shoes that will soon fall apart? I think there is a kernel of goodness in the intent, but the execution beggars belief, especially when you know what impact you could have on a smaller number of people.

Advertising under the guise of corporate social responsibility when it is more like corporate gain from social ills should be frowned upon and not entertained. I want to feel less queasy about a company taking pictures with the native kids, but I just can’t do it anymore.