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.

Target was unapologetic about its plans, telling reporters that it is opening at midnight on Thanksgiving because

Black Friday is one of the busiest and most competitive shopping days of the year. We have heard from our guests that they want to shop Target following their Thanksgiving celebrations rather than only having the option of getting up in the middle of the night.

By contrast, Brian Dunn of Best Buy sounded reluctant about the midnight opening. He told The New York Times that it “became an operating imperative for us” after competitors moved their openings back. “I feel terrible,” he said.

What can you do about it?

First, please don’t shop on Thanksgiving night.

Second, sign the Tell Target to Save Thanksgiving petition at Change.org that, as of this writing, has more than 187,000 signatures.

Too many of us already buy stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have that’s not going to make us happy. This is consumerism run amok.

Best Buy’s in a tough business. The electronics giant ($50 billion in revenues in 2010) competes with Amazon, the best of the online retailers, and Walmart, the world’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer. The company’s shares have fallen lately.

What’s Best Buy’s competitive advantage?

It’s the people in the blue shirts, says Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s chief executive. “Our business is utterly dependent upon getting those 180,000 people aligned and moving forward,” he says.

This is why sustainability is important to Best Buy, the 51-year-old chief executive says. It’s about providing those people with opportunities, making sure they are heard and showing them that Best Buy cares about them and their values.

Brian gave the keynote speech this morning at the Boston College Corporate Citizenship Conference, which is being held in Minneapolis, Best Buy’s home town. We spoke briefly after his talk, which wasn’t your typical speech about sustainability or corporate responsibility. I don’t believe he mentioned the words “carbon footprint.” Instead he talked, in a personal way, about Best Buy’s people, their  aspirations, how they connect to sustainability and how he connects to them.

Providing an inspiring, engaging workplace is “the No. 1 element of Best Buy’s sustainability strategy,” Brian said. “We are leveraging our people as a competitive advantage. We stand on the shoulders of all the people who have worked on the floor for the past 40 years at Best Buy.”

This not only sounds good but makes business sense: Just try getting help from Amazon or Walmart if you can’t figure out why your  TV or computer isn’t doing what you want it to. In a commodity business, what makes Best Buy different is (or needs to be) service.

Of course, all CEOs mouth platitudes about how people are their company’s most valuable asset. Brian is different, I think, because of where he came from–he began his career at Best Buy as a salesman, 26 years ago. “This is personal to me,” he says. He knows that selling boxes isn’t a glamorous job. “Working in retail is tough,” he says. “It’s the monotony.” So he wants to help Best Buy’s people to connect their work to a larger mission that matters to them. He told a story about a Mexican-American worker in Las Vegas who wants to help his relatives get hired as Best Buy expands into Mexico, and another about a woman who used Skype connections to talk with her husband, a soldier stationed overseas.

The idea that Best Buy helps people live more connected lives sounds geeky, he said, but it’s a very human, very emotional idea. “I travel a ton. It’s the thing I hate about my job,” he said. “I would not, could not do this job if I didn’t have this technology.” He talked about watching basketball on TV and sharing the experience with his three sons while on a business trip to London. “The only thing I couldn’t do was put my arm around them,” he said.

Using social media as well as Town Hall-style meetings, Brian spends lots of time talking with and, more important, listening to Best Buy’s people. He writes a blog, called Brian’s Whiteboard, he has a  Twitter account with about 9,000 followers and he’s got 5,000 Facebook friends, the maximum allowed, despite his personal request to FB’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for more. “I really do love these vehicles,” he said. “We’re nuts about listening.” It’s important for him to connect directly with employees and customers, he says, because “people don’t like to tell you stuff that’s bad” once you become CEO.

Several years ago, for example, Best Buy executives decided to save money — about $10 million a year — by cutting back on employee discounts. The reaction from workers was swfit and negative, and the company pulled back. “What can sound smart in a conference room…is maybe not so smart at all,” he says.

All of this connects with sustainability because the environment matters to Best Buy’s people. “Remember,” Brian told me, “better than 60% of employees are 24 years old or less. They’re very in tune with what kind of planet they’re going to have.”

Best Buy’s most visible environmental work has been around product stewardship and e-waste. (See my 2009 FORTUNE story, Best Buy Wants Your Electronic Junk.) The company now recycles about 387 pounds of e-waste a minute, 80 million pounds a year, and the good news is that the value of the commodities that Best Buy collects after taking apart and breaking down all those computers, TV sets, phones, etc., just about pays for the recycling program. “It’s neutral on the p-and-l,” Brian told me. That’s “very, very encouraging to us” because it enables the company can help customers, address an environmental problem and satisfy its employees and shareholders, all at once.

There’s another benefit no one expected. Some Friday afternoons, Brian heads to a nearby store and grabs a hammer, to smashing up other people’s discarded gear.

“I find it enormously therapeutic,” he says.

Imagine that you’re the chief sustainability officer of a FORTUNE 500 company. During a meeting with your CEO, you say: “We need to talk to consumers about using less.”

Improbable? Sure.

Impossible? Perhaps not.

An important conversation to start? Absolutely.

So, at least, says Aron Cramer, the CEO of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a nonprofit association of companies, whose mission is to promote a just and sustainable world.

“The American model of consumption cannot be extended to the entire world, and won’t be, because the planet simply can’t support it,” Aron told me, when we spoke by phone the other day. Yet billions of people around the world want to improve their standard of living. Figuring out how they can enjoy a better life, without destroying the environment, “is the mother of all innovation challenges,” Aron says,

Last month, BSR published a 26-page report called The New Frontier in Sustainability: The Business Opportunity in Tackling Sustainable Consumption [PDF, free download). It’s an attempt to get business leaders to think about what sustainable consumption might look like.

The topic “has been the third rail of sustainability politics,” Aron told me, but he added, with his usual optimism, that “more companies are ready to have this discussion.”

If nothing else, the report makes clear the urgency of the issue. Citing a WWF report [PDF], it says:

By recent estimates, our global footprint now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 percent, and if our current demands continue, by 2030 we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.

And yet:

…countless people have insufficient access to basic needs like food, clean water, and adequate shelter, and they also lack access to the resources they need to improve their lives. In 2006, the 1.2 billion people in the OECD countries had an average annual income per capita of US$30,580, while the 5.4 billion people in the rest of the world earned an average of US$3,130. Of those, 19 percent suffer from hunger, 28 percent are drinking polluted water, and 29 percent are illiterate.7 More than 2 billion people continue to rely on less than US$2 per day to meet their needs.

The question is, what business opportunities, if any,  await companies that figure out how to give poor and middle class people what they want in a sustainable way?

The report points towards a few:

In fast growing emerging markets, it says, companies can create “different ways to improve well being” that enable “the leapfrogging of resource-intensive infrastructure in favor of light materials and digital services.”

Second, sustainable consumption also creates market opportunities for companies that use information technology to deliver positive outcomes for consumers.” Examples: Smart buildings, smart homes, a smart grid.

Third, companies have an opportunity to appeal to “the rising generation of consumers” who are “likelier to favor products whose sustainability attributes are clear.”

Finally, the report says, “embracing sustainable consumption provides a shield against price volatility and potential supply shortages of key commodities”

I asked Aron for examples of companies that are thinking, or even better, acting along these lines. Utility companies like PG&E and Southern California Edison are encouraging conservation and efficiency, he said. True enough, but they’re in a unique position—regulators in California have “decoupled” their profits from sales, so unlike most businesses, the power companies can make more  by selling less.

Chevron, he noted, has an advertising campaign called “Will you join us?” that encourages conservation. “They’ve spent a lot of money to try to convince consumers to use less gasoline,” he said.

Other companies exploring what sustainable consumption might mean include eBay, which wants people to buy used stuff, rather than new, for obvious reasons, and Zipcar, which promotes car sharing. Best Buy sees an opportunity in helping its customers to be more efficient and save money. (See Why eBay is a Green Giant and Best Buy wants your electronic junk) Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iTunes dematerialize books and music. Other companies, meanwhile, are promoting reuse and recycling, or trying to transform products into services: Interface, Recycle Bank and Herman Miller, among others, come to mind.

But, IMHO, that doesn’t add up to much—not yet, anyway. Chevron’s conservation campaign is mostly marketing. Admirable as they are, EBay and Zipcar have unique business models. Cradle-to-cradle design is a niche, not a movement.

I hope Aron and BSR prove me wrong—really, I do—but I don’t think we should count on corporate America, or small business, for that matter, to drive sustainable consumption. Companies can help us consume smarter; clearly there’s a business opportunity in energy efficiency,  and an even bigger one in renewable energy, particularly if governments tax or limit carbon emissions.

But consuming smarter goes only so far.  We also have to consume less of just about everything, and that bumps up squarely against the business imperative, which is to sell more of just about everything, including a whole lots of crap that adds little or nothing of value to the world. If you doubt it,  tour the nearest mall.

So who will lead the way? Religious leaders, we’d hope. Educators, from kindergarten through college. Parents, or more likely children. More to come on this in the next couple of weeks—including, when I take off on vacation next week, one guest blogpost from an eco-rabbi and another from a woman who hasn’t thrown anything into a landfill since 2006.

By now, everyone paying attention to the greening of corporate America knows about Wal-Mart’s sweeping sustainability programs. Big-box rival Best Buy has not been nearly as visible about its efforts to become more environmentally and socially responsible. But I recently visited Best Buy’s headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota, on assignment for FORTUNE, and came away impressed with what the $40-billion a year company has been doing.

My story, headlined Best Buy Wants Your Electronic Junk, appears in the current issue (December 7) of the magazine, as the latest in a series on FORTUNE 500 companies. This one showcases a corporate responsibility leader, and we settled on Best Buy.

Why, you may wonder? Predominantly because Best Buy is a pioneer when it comes to electronics take-back, which is the focus of the story. In all probability, Best Buy has become America’s biggest collector of electronic trash. You can bring back just about anything electric to any of the chain’s 1,044 stores, and they will recycle it safely, sometimes for a small fee. (Read the story, and the fine print, before loading up the trunk of your car, please.) Takeback is an important and radical idea–it’s a pathway to a world where everything gets recycled and nothing goes to waste.

But Best Buy’s doing lots more when it comes to corporate responsibility, and most of it seems tied to its business goals. The company would like to help customers make their homes smarter and greener–part of a shift away from just selling boxes to providing services. It’s taking responsibility for the way its suppliers treat their workers, by policing its supply chain. With a young workforce and young customers, its philanthropy is focused on teens.

More broadly, Best Buy and its new CEO, Brian Dunn, seem determined to create and preserve a listening, learning, open and transparent culture. Dunn told me:

One of my roles as CEO is to be the chief listener. I don’t believe that the model is any longer that there are a few really smart people at the top of the pyramid that make all the strategic decisions. It is much more about being all around the enterprise, and looking for people with great ideas and passionate points of view that are anchored to the business and connected to things our customers care about.

Dunn’s a likable guy–a unpretentious straight shooter with a good sense of humor who rose up from the sales floor and never finished college. People at the company really seem to admire him. (Even those I met way off campus a few weeks later at the Net Impact conference.) I even did a little Tweeting with Brian (you can follow him at BBYCEO) while fact-checking the story. He’s by no means an imperial CEO.

The company isn’t quite as transparent as it says it is, though. Its execs wouldn’t talk in detail about the economics of recycling, or even say how many devices they’ve collected this year. Wal-Mart’s more willing to share what it has learned, in my experience.

Here’s how the FORTUNE story begins:

At a Best Buy store in Roseville, Minn., the traffic in electronics travels a two-way street. Out the door go flat-screen TVs, netbooks, and iPhones. In comes junk — and plenty of it: TVs that can’t decode digital signals, outmoded desktop computers, even the occasional eight-track tape player or ham radio.

Since March, when Best Buy began offering free recycling of gadgets large and small, more than 25 million pounds of ISTB — that’s company lingo for in-store take-back — has made its way to the company’s 1,044 U.S. stores.

About 60 items a day arrive in Roseville, where Christine Cartwright, a store manager who rolled out the take-back program there, says she never expected to get into the recycling business when she joined the retailer. Dealing with all the unwanted stuff adds work, but it also brings an element of surprise to the job. “You never know what people will bring in,” Cartwright says. “Some of these televisions ought to be in a museum.”

So how, exactly, did Best Buy become America’s biggest collector of electronic garbage? Where does it all end up? And can a big-box retailer turn all that trash into cash?

You can read the rest here.

Today, President Obama travels to Arcadia, Florida, home to one of the nation’s biggest solar power plants, to announced 100 grants providing a total of $3.4 billion in recovery-act funding for the smart grid. The federal money will unleash $4.1 billion of private investment that, according to the government, that will bring smart meters to about 18 million American homes, or 13% of homes. It’s a big deal.

What would a smart grid mean to you? In theory, you could save money by running appliances like dishwashers or dryers at night when electricity is cheaper. You’d know how much it costs you to watch that big-screen TV. (Care to take a guess? Read on.) If you installed solar panels on the roof, you could sell electricity back to the grid. Or recharge that electric car you may buy in 2010 or 2011.

The laudable goal is to empower consumers to buy electricity the way we buy groceries or gasoline or airplane tickets –where we know what we are getting and what it costs when we make purchasing decisions. Right now, we consume electricity without knowing how much we are using, understanding where it’s going or knowing the price until an unintelligible utility bill arrives in the mailbox once a month.

The trouble is, layering intelligence and transparency into the electricity grid requires action by two of the slowest-moving entities in all of America–the federal government and the regulated utilities. So you can be certain this won’t be an overnight transformation.

In fact–irony of ironies–the news that Uncle Sam was going to be subsidizing smart-grid rollouts has inadvertently slowed down the process, albeit temporarily. About 570 applications were filed seeking a total of $14 billion in grants. While waiting to see who got the grants and who didn’t, some utilities put their plans on hold.

Last night, Carol Browner, the White House climate czar, Jared Bernstein, an economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden and Matt Rogers, a senior advisor to Energy Secretary Chu and brainy alum of McKinsey & Co., held a conference call to talk about the smart-grid grants. Browner and Bernstein said spending stimulus money on smart grid projects would “create or save” tens of thousands of jobs, and enable the growth of domestic renewable energy—claims that may well be true but weren’t backed up with either data or logic. Of course, giving the electricity industry billions in subsidies will help create or save jobs; the more important question is  how many of those  jobs would have been saved or created anyway had the government chosen to sit on the sidelines.

The DOE won’t release a list of all the grant recipients until today, but Rogers offered these examples on the media call. They went by in a hurry so don’t hold me to every specific:

Baltimore Gas & Electric will get a $200 million grant, to be matched with $251 million from the utility, to deploy 1.1 million smart meters. They will include displays in customers’ homes showing real-time energy use, which will be accompanied by time-of-day pricing. That’s key to enabling people to shift their discretionary energy consumption away from times of peak demands. That, in turn, will smooth out peaks in the demand curve, reducing the need for additional, costly power generation.

Cobb Electric Membership Corp., based in Marietta, Georgia, will get a $16.9 million grant, to be matched by the nonprofit cooperative, to deploy 190,000 across its network, to all of its customers. Deployments like this one should help determine whether the smart grid can deliver on its promises.

San Diego Gas & Electric will get a $21 million grant, matched by $31 million from the utility, to deploy an advanced wireless communications project, making it possible for two-way data exchange between customers and the utility. SDG&E is working with a variety of partners, including GE, Cisco and Google; it’s one of eight utilities in the U.S., India and Canada that is enabling customers to access their daily energy use online by using Google’s PowerMeter.

While all of this activity will speed up deployment of the smart grid, most consumers will have to wait some time before the glories of the smart grid are revealed. One problem will be breaking utility companies of old habits–in many states, the more more power they sell, the more money they make–so conservation is not in their economic interests. For another, deployment of the smart grid depends upon a patchwork of state regulatory schemes. (To learn more, read this excellent overview from ClimateWire on The New York Times website.)

But a lot of smart and powerful companies are pushing hard for the smart grid, so it’s on its way. You can see what GE is up to here, you can read Google’s view here, you can see what IBM is doing here. Just yesterday, I visited Best Buy, where key execs told me they think that networking the smart home to communicate with the smart grid will become a good business for them.

And if you’re wondering what’s driving your utility bill, check out the chart below, from the IBM website, citing DOE statistics. It’s not the typical TV, but the clothes dryer–good reason to invest in a clothesline, at least until the grid gets smarter.

]]> http://www.marcgunther.com/2009/10/27/smart-grid-on-its-way-slowly/feed/ 2 http://www.marcgunther.com/2008/06/08/small-steps/ http://www.marcgunther.com/2008/06/08/small-steps/#comments Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:07:11 +0000 Marc http://www.marcgunther.com/?p=374

To save the planet, we need to take a handful of big steps, like regulating greenhouse gas emissions. We also need to take many, many small steps, like recycling, buying paper from sustainably-harvested forests and using less packaging. Last week’s high-profile defeat of the Lieberman-Warner bill to regulate greenhouse gases was a significant setback, a big step that won’t happen for at least another year.. So this posting will look at some small steps towards a cleaner planet that have not gotten as much attention.

We’ll start with Best Buy. Thanks in part to the work of an effective shareholder activist group called As You Sow, Best Buy announced last week that it will test a free recycling program that will offer consumers a convenient and safe way to get rid of old TVs, computers, cell phones and other unwanted gadgets. The trial will be offered at 177 Best Buy stores in eight states. The company already had an active recycling program, available when consumers bought a new product from Best Buy. The big change here is that Best Buy will take back e-waste that it did not sell.

Conrad McKerron, an activist with As You Sow, told me via email:

As You Sow has been in dialogue with Best Buy, the largest U.S. electronics retailer for several months, and filed a shareholder proposal with the company last fall asking it to look at using its stores for free take back of electronic waste, including TVs, and to partner with electronic manufacturers to develop a workable, convenient national collection system. We withdrew the proposal in exchange for an agreement by the company in April to develop a large scale pilot to test in-store recycling of electronics. They are now ready to roll out a pilot that will offer free take back of most consumer electronics, including TVs, at 117 of their stores in three areas – here in the SF Bay Area, Minneapolis and Baltimore. We believe this represents the first on-going large scale take back of consumer electronics offered by any major retail chain.

This is especially significant because of next February’s switchover from analog to digital TV broadcasting, which could render millions of old TVs obsolete. The ultimate goal—and we are gradually getting there—is for all manufacturers to assume responsibility for take-back all their products, as Dell and HP have for their hardware. (I recently shipped a couple of old printers back to BP, and the system worked well.) Sony’s the leader in the TV industry; its competitors have yet to come along. Best Buy could give them a push.

Speaking of HP, the company recently announced a comprehensive new paper-buying policy, developed in cooperation with NGOs Forest Ethics and World Wildlife Fund. We’ll spare you most of the (boring) details; suffice it to say that HP will set goals for all of its worldwide operations, maximize the use of recycled paper, give preference to papers certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and report publicly on all of this. The paper products covered under HP’s new policy amount to more than 300,000 tons, including its retail printing paper, all packaging, promotional materials, and internally used paper.

Will Craven of Forest Ethics tells me that a growing number of companies are taking responsibility for the environmental impact of the paper they use. Among them are Limited Brands (after an activist campaign targeting the Victoria’s Secret catalog), Patagonia, REI, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, Timberland, Nordstrom’s, and LL Bean and Dell. Visit www.ForestEthics.org or www.catalogcutdown.org for more info.

Finally, Wal-Mart marked a milestone recently—it now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergent in all of its U.S. and Canadian stores, having phased out those wasteful, oversized jugs of Tide, All and the like. Essentially, Wal-Mart muscled its suppliers to ship their detergent in more compact containers, saving water, plastic, shipping costs and shelf space (in the stores and in your laundry room). It’s part of the company’s ambitious goal to reduce the packaging (and waste) of everything it sells.

Since about 25% of all the liquid laundry detergent sold in the U.S. is sold at Wal-Mart stores—yes, the company is THAT big—this means the beginning of the end of those oversized containers.

I’m interviewing Matt Kistler, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of sustainability, later this week at a conference called Greener By Design organized by my friend Joel Makower. After we talk, I’ll report back on other WMT initiatives aimed at reducing packaging and designing products with a lighter environment footprint.

Given the reach of Best Buy, HP and Wal-Mart, these aren’t really small steps—they’re major steps. But let me be clear: They are no substitute for the big steps, like climate-change legislation, that will be required to bring about the change we need, at the scale we need, in a hurry.