Welcome to my third blog. In a week where Government in the UK has introduced minimum pricing on alcohol, M&S has at last recognised that Customer Service is important and said that they will create 5,000 new jobs to help customers, Amazon raised $3bn with a Bond to give them a war chest to march onwards and Comet now looks like crashing out before Christmas, I thought I would focus on Ethical and Environmental trading.
The shocking news that 120 workers were killed in a fire in a clothing factory in Bangladesh, a factory used by Wallmart, raises several questions around health and safety in parts of the world that produce clothing cheaply.
It raises the question: what price guilt free shopping? Certainly a human life is an unacceptable price to pay to get cheap T shirts. The revolution in clothing brought about by globalisation and the advent of supermarkets entering the market with their sophisticated supply chains has meant that the race to bring fashion to our high streets at very low prices has come at a cost. Stories of child labour have frequently hit the headlines in the last decade or so and now lives have been lost in a factory fire.
However, we don’t REALLY care do we?
Consumers in the UK can buy up to 40% of their clothing requirements with just 17% of their annual spend on cloths. Value retailers are enjoying huge success. The market occupied by Primark, TK Maxx as well as the supermarkets has grown 45% in the last 5 years to more than £6 billion. None of us is immune to the lure of fast fashion and the thrill of buying a nice outfit for less than the cost of a takeaway.
Many people will confess to being concerned about the environment, human rights and the cost to the planet for our off spring. Yet how many of us know if the sourcing of these cheap products involve child labour or people working in environments where their lives are at risk?
The answer is not many of us can answer these questions. The same applies to plastic bags.
I have been a retailer for 45 years and when I started in the industry plastic bags did not exist. Today they are a major cause of environmental damage. Yet we still pick up the one trip bag that takes thousands of years to breakdown in land fill. Some companies pretend to have policies to address this problem. M&S in 2008 introduced a 5p charge for the one trip food bag promising to donate the profits to environmental causes. The fact is you could argue that the profit was the full 5p as they were free before. But no, only 1.5p gets donated to environment causes. My rough calculation suggests that M&S has made around £12.4m more profit since the introduction of this so called “Green” policy.
As with cheap clothing the public really does not care about plastic contamination because they still use one trip bags. My solution is simple: Ban high density plastic bags. They did it in Bangladesh after the catastrophic flooding partly caused by plastic bag litter blocking the drains.
What price guilt free shopping?…… The death of a worker in Bangladesh…….. the death of a Dolphin choking on a discarded plastic bag? We will not self regulate the use of plastic bag so an outright ban would force us to care. What are your views?
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