Bookshop and Bags

In a move to be “sustainable”, one of my local chain of bookshops decided it would not provide a bag to take home my purchase, but rather ask me to spend 10 cents to help save the environment, go green and donate my money to a sustainable charity of their choice - presumably at some point in the future - or offer me the chance to buy one of those eco-bags that last for a 1000 uses for a dollar.

Now this annoyed the hell out of me, because I was not convinced my 10 cents (tax) was not being held onto for a period of time and thus improving the cash position of the bookshop. Secondly, the eco-bag purchase is OK if you remember to carry them around with you but apparently most of us do not. Most importantly the shop could never get the message “look around you at all that paper” the industry pollutes more at source than many other industries and you are talking to be about sustainable - come on you are having a laugh aren’t you? It’s my 10 cents, let me donate it to the charity of my choice will you. Green bags! - how much more carbon is being generated than my old bags in their manufacture, branding and distribution, and how much more carbon every time you fire up the SUV to take them back for next time?

Now, I had a choice of bookshops and chose to shop where I could have my purchases (and I buy books in bulk) dropped into a bag. The original store holder told me I didn’t get it and I was mad. Funny though it appears that most of his “value” customers did similar things and he closed down - hows that for business sustainability? Interestingly his competitors did nothing more than what they were already doing and thus differentiated on what must have been the simplest model of customer delight ever.

Now I am passionate about sustainability at all levels, but unless we begin to look at sustainability from the whole process chain and not just try to treat the systems, we will not effect measurable change. The bottom line is that at the moment sustainability is not in the bag.

Supply Chain and Demand - Maintaining Situation Normal

Some businesses order more than they need. They’re then left with stock that they don’t need and can’t sell. The inventory that’s there that you can’t sell costs you money if it’s just sitting there. It may be cheaper, per unit, to buy 4000 tonnes of coal but if you’re going to waste 1000 tonnes of it then this is extra cost that you don’t need. To get economies in the supply chain, businesses used to buy much more than they required. The retail trade was particularly notable for it. Retailers used to buy much more than they needed. This is where the concept of the retail sales season came from to get rid of excess stock. With modern software packages and software tools to manage the supply chain, this situation has improved and businesses have “got smarter”.

If you want to introduce scarcity and prestige, you can size your supply chain to keep limits on manufacturing so that you have more customer demand than you can supply. In times of surplus it creates artificial scarcity and the rules of supply and demand can raise prices. In times where the whole industry is having problems with excess capacity (as the motor industry is at the moment), it’s only necessary to relax the supply chain rather than dispensing with whole sections of it since you were making the product artificially scarce to begin with. If you can still sell all that you’re producing (but now without the same scarcity) then it’s situation normal.