In his history of twentieth-century consumerism, Matthew Hilton notes that ‘[b]y 1892, Black seems to have given up on the project [of the Consumers’ League] and she would later turn against the idea of the Consumers’ League as a potent weapon of the labour movement’. Chapter 3 of this volume will consider in more detail the circumstances and publications Hilton is referring to when he states that Clementina Black ‘turned against’ the notion that a consumers’ league might be a useful tool to support trade unions. It is important, however, not to understand from his observation that Black's brand of ethical consumerism failed to find any fertile soil in spite of her enthusiastic promotion over a period of five years. On the contrary, the work of a number of different scholars of consumer activist initiatives at the end of the nineteenth century suggests that the idea of consumers’ league-style activism was not abandoned, and that many concerned consumers retained it as a possibility of wielding socio-economic influence in protest against some of the negative effects of an increasingly complex economy.

For instance, both Hilton himself and Ian Mitchell show that the project, though under a different descriptor, was taken up by the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Britain in the 1890s. This organisation sought to promote an ethical and equitable society on an Anglican religious basis and believed that encouraging its members to deal with businesses that used fair employment practices was one way of working towards this better society. To help its members direct their custom to fair and ethical employers, it produced whitelists of dressmakers and bakers that met their standards in London. The two industries they chose are telling in the wider debate around consumer activism during this period. Dressmakers are obviously representative of the long-standing concerns about exploitation in the garment trade. By the later nineteenth century, baking had also become central to social concerns about industrial developments, as it was closely associated in the public consciousness with fears about food adulteration as well as poor working conditions. Other responses to poor and sometimes dangerous practices in the baking trade included the Salvation Army's bakery, which began to advertise delivery in and around London from the mid-1890s.