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The Week In Retail Issue 18
EDITOR’S COMMENT
ARE WE ALL BECOMING ECO-WARRIORS?
I must admit that it was cracking fun helping shoot the video for our first ever ‘2 Minute Tour‘ of a store earlier this week – which you can view on the cover. The store we featured was Sophie Lejeune’s new Society Zero shop on Queen Margaret Drive in the West End of Glasgow which literally only opened about 10 days ago.
It’s a really interesting zero waste business but Sophie has taken a slightly more pragmatic approach than some of the other zero waste stores we’ve profiled because she’s interested in making the store as appealing as possible to as wide a range of customers as possible. She doesn’t insist on exclusively organic lines, for instance, which is quite unusual in the zero waste retailing community.
One of the really interesting parts of the interview I did with Sophie, however, was when I asked her who has actually been using the shop in the first week, what types of shoppers? The implication was clearly that I was expecting to hear that it’s mostly students and eco-warriors. She responded with a laugh and by then gently but forcefully putting me straight on a few things. The gist of her response – which you can listen to in full in the second video here – was that an interest in reducing the impact we have on the planet is probably more commonplace than I would think.
With so many schools, colleges, workplaces and social venues working hard on improving their eco-practices (and shouting about it), awareness of these issues among the wider population is higher than it’s ever been and that’s only going to grow further in future as new generations come through. That’s clearly being accelerated by the global media interest in plastic pollution and the like. The upshot is that Sophie believes we will see more and more consumers taking more of an interest in the ethical credentials of the businesses they buy from, or the businesses that they “invest in”, as she puts it.
The implications of a shift like that would be significant for the convenience retailing sector.
