M & S: Ethical question

Rich – good way to look at it, silver lining and all. Id use my local grocer and deli if they sold anything decent 🙂

Surely it depends on your ethics? If you have capitalist ethics then its fine, if you dont then it might not be. A cynic would suggest that if a company had been holding off redundancies due to being nervous of -ve press, now would be a good time.

There is no point at which companies make enough profit to overcome an ethics threshold.
Capitalism is based on exploitation by definition.

Have you never read Marx?

I think a lot of stores are looking to the future rather than what is actaully happening right now, big stores are shutting down all over, local councils are going to lose lots of income because of these closures, are the remaining stores going to be hit by the councils trying to make up lost revenue ? shedding staff may be the only way to keep profitable and therefore offset overheads

On the question of how these closures will effect those ‘down the line’ I’d like to add my tup’ence worth.

As someone who works in an M&S DC that supports two of the stores that are being closed I think its worth bearing in mind that when the stores were (pretty recently) opened we didn’t take on any extra staff to deal with the extra workload. The larger stores are the ones that require the greatest amount of labour to support with the smaller stores being slotted in around them on the loading and dispatch schedules. As a result no-one (other than the usual paranoid, anti-management few) is worried about the job losses.

The logistics side of the business (DC’s, suppliers, transportation) has always been the part that the M&S hierarchy targets first for cut-backs when times are tough. As a result they are the areas that now have the least amount of slack for trimming, hence the decision on store closures and job loses at head office instead this time, which obviously grabs the attention of the press a little more.

The Simply Food stores were an obvious target for closures really. The food they sell, although good quality and ethically sourced is unquestionably more expensive than that sold by some other companies and when money is short most people will dump ethics and taste for cheapness, hence the popularity of stores such as Lidl and Aldi.

RichPenny – Member

Interesting point jonb. Are you saying that 1 billion profit is not enough to have ethics?

More than last year is usually enough. With business it always seems that no matter how big the profit they will need to make more next year to be happy. In some respect it drives innovation but i fear it is ultimately doomed to failure as it is not sustainable indefinately.

If we want to help the people who work for M and S perhaps we should buy everything there to give them more money

SLightly aside, but I went into a Simply Food store with their big fridges pumping out the chill into the already frezzing air. And from above, the air con was grinding away pumping hot air into the fridges. Nice one, Plan A!

If you want ethics then capitqalism is not the game to play. John Lewis and Co op are the best of the ethical retailers as they play the co op game – nbot the capitalist one.

Tandem, I agree they are the best two but neither act totally ethically. Both exploit both their workforce and their customer. Co op act ethically in relative terms with regard to where they invest, however they invest to make profit and I’m trying hard to think how a profit can be made without some degree of exploitation.

M&S save up all their vacancies in store then give them to the best Christmas staff in January…essentially everyone starts off on a temp contract at Christmas so M&S can pick and choose who to take on. New staff start off on a handful of hours to spread the jobs around then over time this builds up.

So, M&S created thousands of jobs literally days before they announced the job cuts but kept quiet about it! It’s all about giving the city want they want…they want to hear about job cuts and cost savings and as a result the M&S share price went up.

It’s a shame that some jobs got caught up in the games that have to be played with the city but look behind the headlines and M&S aren’t too bad, they have probably created more jobs than were cut.

Plan A is expected to cost £200 million over 5 years…that’s quite an ethical thing to spend profits on (they aim to not increase costs to the customer). Whilst it has some glaring flaws in it I can’t think of another retailer that has an ethics/environment/health plan that comes anywhere close to it either in scope or money invested on it.