International Retailers Not a sausage
Slightly belated to these pages, but in Kenya, Carrefour has launched a Women in Retail Council to champion diversity and inclusion in its organisation, providing female staff with mentoring, career guidance, advice, and in-depth retail industry product knowledge. It also targets scaling up women’s involvement in its operations, with 23% of managerial positions across its 20 stores countrywide currently filled by women. And here’s one for the “Nice idea, moving on” category: German discount supermarket Penny, has run a promotion, of sorts, in which customers are asked to pay a little more for items such as meats and cheeses to reflect their “true cost” on the environment and people's health. At all 2,150 of its branches, the supermarket raised prices for nine products based on calculations from two German universities, taking into account costs related to climate, soil, health, and water use. Plucking an example from the air, Mühlenhof wiener, a brand of sausage, increased from €3.19 to €6.01, an +88% rise. Other cheeses and meats spiked northwards to the tune of +60%. Proceeds from the initiative will be donated to a local agricultural project which supports struggling family-run farms.
Comment: Important work. But it will be a long while before shoppers will be willing to pay the planetary cost of what they consume.