Essay on Csr: Sustainability Practices- Walmart vs. Starbucks

The evolving practices around corporate social responsibility (CSR) provide dynamic, and complex opportunities for business. Overall, businesses are modifying their core purpose from creating shareholder profit toward creating shared value across their stakeholders, with shareholders being only one of the many stakeholders. This paper analyzes the 74th ranked 2014 Fortune Global 500 Company Kroger. Kroger started in 1883 as a local Cincinnati, Ohio grocery store, and has expended to be the second largest retail grocery store in the United States, and fifth largest in the world, owning retail food and drug stores, jewelry stores, and convenience stores in the United States (Kroger, 2015). Kroger remains headquartered in Ohio. An overview of Kroger, and specifically Kroger’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy and implementation will be discussed, followed by a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) CSR analysis informing a concluding plan to enhance Kroger’s CSR maturity.

Wal-Mart should project a community friendly, environment caring and employee welfare seeking brand image to combat. Emerging threats. Investment in sustainability initiatives like solar energy and recycling could be possible opportunities.

It is said that “The only social responsibility that there is, is to obey laws and pay taxes,” but according to Milton Friedman, “social responsibility is to increase profits.” This kind of responsibility also a form of giving back. Many people believe that the future of Wal-Mart is sustainability. Wal-Mart Stakeholders are the associates, otherwise known as employees, the suppliers, and the investors of this company. I believe that Wal-Mart is doing enough to become more sustainable both locally and globally by the resources, its key stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the sustainability practices of two companies in the same industry. The two companies chosen for comparison are The Hershey Company and Coca-Cola Enterprises, both of which are in the consumer staples industry. These two corporations are ranked sixth and eighth, respectively, on the Newsweek Top Green Companies in the U.S 2015. They have taken pride in creating sustainable product designs, having environmentally sustainable processes and supply chain management.

“Every business has its own business strategy which leads the company towards success and accomplishment.” (Stankeviciute et al., 2012, p. 1200). The following analysis will examine the similarities and differences between Starbucks and Walmart in regards to people, profit, and planet.

In 2005, “Wal-Mart took a leading role in disaster relief, contributing $18 million and 2,450 truckloads of supplies to victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita”. In addition, Wal-Mart strongly believes in supporting our service members and veterans. Along with Wal-Mart’s charitable contributions, it has “made a major commitment to environmental sustainability, announcing goals to create zero waste, use only renewable energy and sell products that sustain people and the environment” (Wal-Mart, 2015). Even though this retail giant exceeds its competitors in profits and revenues and, is a very charitable organization, it still faces many

The long-held belief that a business exists for the only purpose of generating profits for shareholders is quickly going by the wayside, as it becomes increasingly evident how much of an impact organizations have on communities and society. The ability of any enterprise to balance the ethical and economic factors and their respective agendas to joint fulfillment is the foundation of highly profitable and sustainable business for the long-term (Robert, Kodua, 2012). Staples, Inc., has one of the most advanced Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs in the retailing industry today. The Soul Program at Staples is based on a foundation of four pillars which include Community, Diversity, Ethics and Environment. Staples has taken these four foundational elements and successfully integrated them into the culture of their corporation, transforming them into a long-term competitive advantage (Field, 2009). The idealized state of CSR Programs is to provide an agile, intelligent framework for integrating economic- and ethically driven programs effective (Robert, Kodua, 2012). Staples has done this by creating a culture of accountability, one that is defined by scorecards that measure highly specific objectives in each of these four pillar areas, in addition to benchmarking the company's own performance at diversity program attainment, training, and a continual focus on attaining higher levels of delivered value

Corporate social responsibility is very important in a business. Millions of Wal-Mart shoppers feel Wal-Mart is socially responsible for their actions and provides high value (Carroll and Buchholtz 779). As issues of environmental awareness grew, Sam Walton began to think environmentally and made commitments to “land, air and water” (Carroll and Buchholtz 774). Wal-Mart began to be socially responsible for the environment by making shelf tags from “100 percent recycled paper” in hopes of informing customers about Wal-Mart‟s efforts to be environmentally safe (Carroll and Buchholtz 774). On the other hand, some business and communities dread “the winds of the „Wal-Mart Way‟” (Carroll and Buchholtz 774). Carroll and Buchholtz, quoting Kennedy Smith, state that „“downtowns will never again be the providers of the basic consumer goods and services they once were”‟ (774). One of the biggest complaints of communities is that Wal-Mart “kills” small “mom and pop” downtown merchants because they cannot compete with Wal-Mart‟s low prices (Carroll and Buchholtz 774). These small stores have been around for years, and Wal-Mart just comes and takes over. Carroll and Buchholtz say that some retailers believe the methods that Wal-Mart uses/d to compete with their competitors left “bad tastes” in their mouths (775). Retailers told Atlanta

As much as Walmart may care about the environment, they will not sacrifice some profit now in order to actually help it in the immense way they are able to. These large companies recognize that sustainability is good business, so why will they not actually change? Eventually, they will not have any choice. And by that point, it will cost millions more to reverse the damages. By looking at the environment through an economic lens, Walmart sees the importance of changing but also that the monetary value of changing is not as great as the monetary value of continuing on as they are. Despite already being the largest corporation in the world, Walmart continues to add more harm to the environment because they are still not satisfied with their

Wal-Mart has a major interest towards innovating new ideas to ensure their business operations are environmental friendly: implementing wind harvesting, using alternative battery technology to operate machinery, utilize sustainable building materials and find away to process organic waste (Wal-Mart Corporation, 2008). Being environmentally friendly is one of the ways that they give back to both international and local communities.

Sustainability has become a great topic of interest in many arenas. Particularly, leading organizations are recognizing sustainability needs to be an essential aspect of their long term strategies. With this recognition, better business practices are being sought by investors as well as sustainability is becoming a driving force for better efficiencies and innovation. Two organizations, Wal-Mart and Starbucks, have both took on sustainability as long term initiatives to address their customer needs and affect how their suppliers operate.

Due to increasing environmental imbalances, it is necessary for firms to achieve competitive advantages in the area of environmental convergence as well. Wal-Mart is putting continuous efforts from a long time for environment sustainability and energy conservation. It also received Aspen Institute Energy and Environment award for Corporate Energy Efficiency in 2009. Here are a few steps that Wal-Mart has taken to encourage environmental sustainability:

Wal-Mart now has to rebuild their images, procedures on how they conduct business nationwide and how the use ethical business practices. The New York time article reported, “Wal-Mart announces new ethical and environmental principles complete by 2012”. (Robinson, 2008)

With the development of economic globalization, “fast food” becomes a more and more substantial industry in the business world, which adapts to the pace of people’s life. Each organization spares every effort to stand forward the competition due to the fierce competition. In this article, we focus on the “Starbucks”, a prevailing coffee manufacturer in recent years.

Starbucks is an American multinational corporation that is arguably considered as the best coffee house in the globe in terms of global performance. The company has for a long time considered CSR as an important part of its operations and currently, it adopts an Anglo-American model of corporate social responsibility. This is an approach to CSR that maintains close links between shareholder interests with the operations of the organization. The company ensures that its CSR initiatives are appropriately audited so that it is able to learn of its CSR performance and not as an effort of complying with legal regulations and this is what makes the strategies adopted by the company very relevant. The corporate social responsibility codes that are derived from Starbucks’ Anglo American model have contributed to great product development by the company, efficient production and quality customer service. All these have been made possible through the company’s Corporate Governance Codes . At starbucks, the codes have provisions for the code of conduct which acts as guidelines as to how the employees at the organization behave. The code of conduct guides the entire organization including the board of