Best Practices Not Included

Paper or........

It was bound to happen eventually, but Kudos to Whole Foods for being a leader on this one.  Today Whole Foods announced that they will be eliminating the use of plastic bags in all of their 270 stores.  The company has committed to reaching this goal by April 22, which I might add is Earth Day for all of you keeping score at home.  It's been interesting to watch consumer perceptions change in recent years.  I'm only 22 years old, but I can positively remember an older time when this move would have been called a mistake by analysts and the general public would have been laughing.  Other domestic retailers will surely follow this trend as many retailers in Australia and China have also made commitments to stop using plastic.  Because of concerns over environmental impact, governments will without a doubt continue to crack down and eliminate plastics when it's feasible.  For this reason, Whole Foods efforts will continue to yield the organization competitive advantages in the retail sector.  Ingrained in Whole Foods core values has been caring  for the environment and localized community.  The company has said they will continue to offer 100%  recycled paper grocery bags.  However, I have to believe the company is hoping shoppers will bring their own reusable bags.  One thing is for sure, while these are only small steps towards a more eco-friendly society, we will continue to see major cultural attitude shifts when it comes to the environment and how we interact and co-exist with the planet at large.

Mitigating Junk Mail

Seth writes a great post and points us to GreenDimes.com.

GreenDimes is a business that takes your name and address and for 10 cents a day (for those counting that comes out to $36.00/year), they contact direct marketers and make sure your name gets taken off mailing lists. But that's not all they do, on top of this, they'll apparently plant a tree in your name every month. The philosophy here being to try and offset paper consumption by regrowing tree population. Seth had this to say in thinking about his junk mail experience:

"I had a thought: I'm going to rip all of these up when I get inside and just toss them. Why couldn't they just email me all this crap, right into my junk mail folder, where a nice little email service would delete it after 10 days. I took that thought a little further and began to think about all the paper that would be saved if all those marketers quit sending me all that junk."

I've heard of people mailing junk mail back on their own, but for most of us, we just don't care enough to take the time to do that. After checking out GreenDimes website, one of my favorite things about the organization is their integrated business model. Companies should ask themselves the questions: "what do we stand for" or "what are our values". As a business, you have to be cultured now a days. Green Dimes slogan is great: "our planet - do you give a dime?" Also, I love the impact widget on the right side of the homepage, this really helps send their message home. It seem's understandable why people are jumping on board this service. Seth, like myself, and most everyone are sick of having to deal with junk mail. We would all like to see this form of marketing die and in time, it will. These types of programs, national do not call lists, spam blockers etc. are all barriers we as consumers will only continue to put up if marketers keep resorting to these kinds of tactics.