Consumption

Crony capitalism at Safeway

November 29, 2011

A beautiful new Safeway opened recently in Bethesda, MD, where I live. It’s  just a couple of blocks from a nearly-new Giant supermarket. To attract shoppers, Safeway sold turkeys before Thanksgiving for 39 cents a pound. Maybe it was 33 cents. In any event, I hope we can all agree that this kind of thing–namely, competition–is what makes America great.

Except, that is, if you live nearby in Washington, D.C., where, as The Washington Post reports today, Safeway poses big hurdle to plan for Southeast Wal-Mart.

Walmart, it so happens, wants to open a new store at a long-neglected shopping center known as Skyland in one of the low-income precincts Washington. The trouble is, a Safeway across the street has a covenant from the 1990s that prevents a competitor from locating in Skyland. Safeway, to its credit, has 15 stores in the district and is one of the city’s biggest employers. But why it was given a promise that no competitor would locate nearby is anybody’s guess.

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s office says hizzoner is trying to work out a compromise with Safeway.

Craig Muckle, Safeway’s manager of public affairs, tells The Post:

We want to be cooperative, but there is a reason that the covenant is in place to protect our interests.

Give him credit for honesty, if not for his faith in markets. He goes on to explain that city neighborhoods, unlike the suburbs, may not have enough buying power to support two big grocery stores.

In the city, with one possible exception, there is no grocery store directly across the street from another grocery store….To have more than one…someone may survive, someone may not.

Quelle horreur! Competition that results in winners and losers is evidently fine when it comes to the Superbowl, political campaigns and even suburban shopping, but not when it comes to buying groceries in your nation’s capital.

 

 

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Maybe the best retail ad ever

November 27, 2011

Patagonia's home page this weekend

In the midst of the madness of black Friday, and this weekend of American consumerism run amok, come a few wise words from the outdoor retailer Patagonia.

In a full-page ad in the New York Times, the privately held company asks shoppers to think more carefully about what they purchase, and the real cost of all the things we buy.

The headline: Don’t Buy This Jacket

“We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else,” the company says.

The rest of the ad is worth reading, and thinking about, so I’ll copy the text here:

It’s Black Friday, the day in the year retail turns from red to black and starts to make real money. But Black Friday, and the culture of consumption it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that support all life firmly in the red. We’re now using the resources of one-and-a-half planets on our one and only planet.

Because Patagonia wants to be in business for a good long time – and leave a world inhabitable for our kids – we want to do the opposite of every other business today. We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else. [click to continue…]

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Unilever CEO: “Don’t stay on the sidelines”

November 22, 2011

As a global consumer products giant, with $44 billion euros [nearly $60 billion] in 2010 revenues, Unilever has a big impact on how and what people buy. Two billion consumers use a Unilever product on any given day. If you use Lipton Tea, eat Hellman’s mayonnaise or Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or use Dove or Lifebuoy soaps or  Suave hair products, you’re among them.

Paul Polman, Unilever’s CEO, embraces the idea that his company can make the world more just and sustainable. Unilever buys about 4-5% of the world’s palm oil, so it has promised to purchase all its palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015. It buys about 7% of the world’s tea, making it the world’s largest buyer, so Unilever aims to have all the tea in all Lipton tea bags sourced from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ estates by 2015, and 100% of its tea sustainably sourced by 2020.

“We have to take that responsibility,” Polman said today (Nov. 22) during a webcast called Sustainable Living: Mainstream or pipe dream?  The webcast, organized by the Guardian Sustainable Business, was held a year after Unilever released its sweeping Sustainable Living Plan, in which it promised to cut the environmental footprint of its products in half, help more than 1 billion people take action to improve their health and well-being, and source 100% of its agricultural raw materials sustainably. [See my 2010 blogpost, Unilever's big, broad, bold sustainability plan.]

But there are limits to what even a big company can do, so Unilever has begun thinking seriously about how to change consumer behavior around sustainability. Today, it released a new report called Inspiring Sustainable Living [available for download] which identifies five levers for change: Make it understood, make it easy, make it desirable, make it rewarding, make it a habit. [click to continue…]

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Thanksgiving shopping madness

November 20, 2011

Do we really need to start the holiday shopping season on Thanksgiving night?

Here’s a comment that showed up yesterday on an April 2011 blog post [Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn: Sustainability is all about people] that I wrote praising Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn:

Brian Dunn, what a thoughtful and caring person he likes to portray himself. As a current employee, I have to join my fellow employees in cutting our Thanksgiving time short because we are opening at mid night. Brian Dunn isn’t going to be working in a store for 14 hours straight. Correction, I get a measly 30 minute break somewhere in that 14 hours. On a regular work day, I work for 7 hours straight without a required lunch because my shift has to be longer than 7 hours to take a lunch. They don’t even let me break away unless it’s completely empty in my department (which is rarely the case). Best Buy also keeps diminishing the value of the employee discount, which is one of the best parts of working for them. Eventually, there may not be a discount. If Best Buy keeps making knee-jerk reactions like opening at Midnight on Thanksgiving day, there may not be a Best Buy down the road. Customers and Employees want to spend time with their families on Thanksgiving day!

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Valerie Brunmeier of San Jose plans a festive feast for her family on Thanksgiving, but two of her sons will have to hustle off to their retail jobs at local malls later that night.

“How do you relax when you know you’re heading out the door at 10 p.m. or so to go to work, and work all night long?” she said.

…Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s, Gap, Walmart, Toys R Us and Macy’s are among the major retailers that plan to fling open their doors early this season. Some stores plan to open at 8 or 9 p.m. Thursday, while others will open a few hours later at the stroke of midnight, trying to jump-start sales amid an uncertain economic climate.

It’s an arms race, of sorts, and the losers are the thousands of workers who have to cut their holiday short.

The backlash against Thanksgiving night openings began with petitions aimed at Target on Facebook and change.org. [click to continue…]

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What’s wrong with economic growth?

November 13, 2011

Dave Gardner is a gutsy guy.  Gardner, who is 56, a former corporate filmmaker, set his career aside a few years ago to run for office in his hometown of Colorado Springs, CO, and make a documentary film called Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth that puts forth an unpopular idea–that economic growth is bad for the environment and bad for human happiness.

“I want to make it OK for people to be against growth,” Dave says, when asked why he ran for office and made the movie.

Dave and I fundamentally disagree. I think economic growth is vital, not just to lift billions of people out of poverty–global per capita income is currently about $10,700, if Wikipedia is to be believed–but because societies that are more prosperous are better able to deal with the issues of environmental and social justice that matter most to me.

Nevertheless, I would urge you to see Dave’s film (screenings are listed here, or you can buy the DVD) both because he raises a number of important questions and and because, to his credit, has managed to capture on film some of the world’s most provocative thinkers on the topic of growth–Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford professor and author of the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, sociologist Juliet Schor, whose books include The Overworked American, the heretical economist Herman Daly, environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, and the charismatic political economist and author Raj Patel. [click to continue…]

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REI’s Sally Jewell at Net Impact

November 5, 2011

Sally Jewell – 2011 Net Impact Conference from Net Impact on Vimeo.

Sally Jewell, the chief executive of REI,  is the most unpretentious big-company CEO I know. When we first met a couple of years ago for dinner in Washington, she arrived in toting an REI backpack (made from recycled material). She’s plain-spoken, direct and a good interview.Her company, as you might expect,  is committed to minimizing its environmental footprint. (Without  a healthy planet, there’s no business for REI.)

So I was delighted when Sally agreed to a keynote interview at the 2011 Net Impact conference last week in Portland. We talked about how REI has lowered its energy and GHG emissions while adding stores, about the (unfair) competition from Amazon and about how ideas percolate up, down and around the retailer.

Some 2,600 people attended the New Impact confab which, as always, was a great event. I’m only slightly biased, as a board member of Net Impact; the organization’s mission is to inspire and equip young people to use the power of business to make a more just, sustainable world. You can hear more about Net Impact on the video below from Liz Maw, Net Impact’s executive director.. The interview with Sally is nearly an hour long, but I’ve posted it here, figuring that at the least REI employees may want to watch.

And, if you are one of those people who plans ahead, please mark your calendar for the 2012 Net Impact conference on Oct. 26-27, in Baltimore, MD.

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Wall Street’s costly reputation problem

November 3, 2011

Not since the Great Depression have Americans harbored so much ill-will against what were once called “the monied interests.”

This should worry Wall Street and the big banks.

The latest evidence: Bank of America’s decision this week to drop its plans to charge customers $5 a month for making purchases with their debit cards, in the wake of a customer revolt.

Jay Leno

On change.org, a 22-year-old Washington, D.C., activist named Molly Katchpole started a petition against the BofA fee that gathered 306,000 signatures in less than a month. Politicians chimed in (for better or worse) and even Jay Leno got into the act, saying on Halloween night:

One kid wanted to charge me five bucks to give him candy…I said, “Who are you supposed to be?” He said, “Bank of America!”

BofA reversed itself after rivals Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase, Sun Trust and Regions Financial said they’d drop customer tests of new debit fees. Analysts say this will cost the banking industry as much as $8 billion in foregone revenue.

In other words, the banks are giving up billions of dollars because people don’t trust them to do the right thing.

[click to continue…]

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Sustainable sushi is not an oxymoron

November 1, 2011

Environmentalist and UC Berkeley grad Kristofor Lofgren moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2006 to go to law school. Today, he owns Bamboo Sushi, a cozy, stylish eatery that’s been rated as the most sustainable seafood restaurant in the U.S.

Bamboo Sushi’s bona fides are overwhelming: Powered by wind energy, certified by the Marine Stewardship Council and legally constituted as a B Corp., Bamboo Sushi has partnerships with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Blue Ocean Institute and Salmon Nation. Then there’s the paper on which the 23-page menu is printed, the reusable chopsticks made of teal, the wood tables….

“Every aspect of the restaurant is certified by an independent third party,” declares Kristofor, sounding like the lawyer he didn’t become.

But what about the food? Well, Bamboo Sushi catered a reception (sponsored by FMYI) at last week’s Net Impact conference in Portland, winning raves from out-of-town visitors like me.

More important, reviewers praise the food, as do diners on sites like Yelp. GQ’s well-known food critic Alan Richman named the restaurant’s Alaska Black Cod with Smoked Soy and Roasted Garlic Glaze one of his five best dishes of 2010, writing: [click to continue…]

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Campbell’s Doug Conant: “How can I help?”

October 27, 2011

Douglas Conant

Ten years into his career in the food industry, Douglas Conant was fired from his job at General Mills. He had two small children, a big mortgage, and a feeling of bitterness. Then he called an outplacement firm where the man on the other end of the line answered as he always did: “Hi, it’s Neil McKenna. How can I help?”

That moment–in a new book, Conant describes it as a “touchpoint”–shaped his approach to leadership. “Leadership isn’t about you,” he says. “It’s about them.” McKenna became a mentor and friend, and Conant saw how seemingly small interactions can have a deep impact on people. He went only to a long career at Kraft, Nabisco and as CEO of Campbell Soup, where he led an impressive turnaround before retiring in July.

I met Conant this week in Washington to talk about his 10 years at Campbell and about the book. In Touchpoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments (Jossey-Bass), Conant and his co-author, consultant Mette Norgaard, argue that “the daily interruptions that leaders face in nearly epidemic proportions are actually the moments where the greatest leadership opportunities lie.”

They write:

Each of the many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or low point in someone’s day. Each is an opportunity to establish high performance expectations, to infuse the agenda with greater clarity and more energy, and to influence the course of events. Each is a chance to transform an ordinary moment into a Touchpoint.

“The soft stuff is the hard stuff,” Conant likes to say. [click to continue…]

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Big Sugar, free markets and Monica Lewinsky

October 25, 2011

Next time I unwrap a candy bar, I’ll think about sugar, free markets, the Florida Everglades and Monica Lewinsky.

Why? Because although the sugar in that candy bar may be natural, its price is entirely artificial–depending, as it does, on government trade barriers, price supports and subsidized water, as well as the fact that the sugar industry is paying only a fraction of the costs of cleaning up pollution in the Everglades.

Put simply, crony capitalism is alive and well in the sugar business.

“The sugar industry doesn’t make its money from agriculture,” declares David Guest, a lawyer with Earthjustice and an outspoken critic of Big Sugar. “They make it from government.”

That’s an exaggeration, of course. The Florida industry grows lots of sugar, invests hundreds of millions of dollars in new equipment and employs thousands of people, as I learned last week  during a day-long tour of the Lake Okeechobee region of south Florida, as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Miami. We met Guest from Earthjustice (“because the earth needs a good lawyer”), officials from Florida water agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers, an Audubon society biologist and, most interestingly, Judy Sanchez, senior director of public affairs for the U.S. Sugar Corp. [click to continue…]

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