In today’s atmosphere of “Green is good,” retail businesses are touting green buildings and green practices everywhere we turn. They gloat over the big changes they are making to become more sustainable, but these changes are not enough.
In fact, the physical footprints of these companies are often vastly larger than need be, which in turn makes most of their green initiatives little more than strategies to divert consumer’s attention away from the fact that the main reason for their existence, namely the products they are promoting and selling, is what needs to be addressed.
What good does it do to house a business in a USGBC LEED certified building or encourage “green” practices within the company when the products and services sold by that company are toxic? This common business practice is failing to meet the needs of our society in a meaningful way.
Retailers exist, first and foremost, to market and sell products to end users. That is their job. They must make enough of a profit margin to pay not only for the products they sell, but also for employee salaries and benefits and all their other business expenses.
In addition, retailers need to invest in advertising and marketing, and in the communities in which they reside, in order to remain stable, vibrant, sustainable and profitable. That is reality.
But retailers also play a role as educators, in the sense that they teach consumers about products through in-store (and now, online) information and various types of advertising.
Consumers want to be able to find information about the products they buy, and they want to get this information from someone they feel is credible, someone they can interact with and ask questions.
They also often want the opportunity to interact with (touch, sit in, try on, operate, etc.) the products they are considering purchasing.
It used to be that storekeepers filled this educational roll for their customers. They knew every product they stocked, where it came from, who made it and the quality of it.
They staked their reputation on those products, knowing that their profitability (or lack thereof) relied on the trust and confidence of their customers.
Retailers need to go back to these basics. We need to focus on relevant products, generating desirable shopping experiences, pricing products fairly and promotion them ethically, all the while aiming to support people in living more sustainable lifestyles.
Instead, retailers have played a significant part in getting us into this unsustainable mess and, by and large, they are still conducting business as usual. If you don’t believe me, watch the video sensation, “Story of Stuff” by Annie Leonard.
One of the results of unfair competition between e-commerce and brick and mortar stores has been slashed profit margins. Over time, this has created a negative cycle of needing an ever–increasing supply of ever-cheapening products.
In 2008 the United States purchased over $337 billion in products from China alone, where manufacturing standards are less than stellar to say the least, as evidenced by a recent rash of product recalls.
The U.S., with its loosey-goosey oversight of importers, has become the toxic dumping ground for the cheap goods of the world.
To keep afloat, retailers, instead of spending time and money on researching and obtaining relevant, good-quality merchandise, have developed elaborate and complex solutions in the form of blind supply, manufacturing and distribution channels aimed at, not stocking product, but allowing consumers to gain easy access to whatever they need, as fast as they need it at the at the cheapest prices possible.
On the other end, consumers have been trained to buy, buy, and buy this inferior, and at times toxic, merchandise with little understanding of where the products come from or how they are made.
Even consumers who want to change their purchasing practices are frustrated by the dearth of “green from the ground up” retail options and information available to them.
I saw this first-hand when I recently went on a fact-finding mission and visited a few mid-level and high-end furniture stores. Despite my own knowledge and ability to ask the right questions, none of the sales associates I spoke with were able to give me meaningful details, from the perspectives of health and sustainability, about how the furniture was made and what materials went into it.
We live in a world overrun with information, yet distribution is blind and more often than not, clear, pertinent details regarding the products we might buy are not available.
Shouldn’t businesses have an ethical obligation to be honest and open about their products and what is in them, to teach consumers that quality is important? As the drivers of human consumption behavior, retailers must become part of the sustainability solution.
They must successfully model and enroll people in adopting sustainable lifestyles—first and foremost at home. Yet they are not living up to this obligation. Instead, for the sake of profit margins, they are often talking out both sides of their mouth, stocking and selling green, organic and environmentally friendly products right along side toxic ones.
This has to stop.
Considering the current state of our environment, “green” (or sustainable) should not be ONE option, but rather the ONLY option.
Providing retail options that are more relevant to the world we currently live in is one paradigm shift that will enable happier and healthier American lifestyles.
Balanced between manufacturers, distributors and end users, retailers have the power to positively impact not only what is on the shelves but, through ethical promotion, what is desirable. It can be done, and Whole Foods is just one example of a “green from the ground up” company taking this leap and profiting from it.
I also choose to run my company as sustainably as possible. I know each and every product that I sell and vendor that I work with.
My team painstakingly researched green, non-toxic and sustainable products and their manufacturers, as well as other “green indices,” to create standards that can be used to rate products in the marketplace and develop ways of disseminating that integral information to consumers.
From all that research, we developed the workingwonders Green Guide to provide consumers with useful information about products for the home. workingwonders has been designed “green from the ground up” to be part of the solution in the retail world, not part of the problem.
Businesses need to take sustainability beyond their “green” buildings. They need to hold themselves to a higher standard and regain some of the credibility they have lost over the last several decades.
There are relationships between quality, time, integrity and price which need to be reestablished and retailers are the natural group to reconnect the dots for all of us.
By developing a more ethical philosophy and re-centering their sustainable practices around the products and services they sell, retailers can positively impact their community and the world in a new and powerful way.
That’s the world I want to live in.
