A Scenario in Social Sustainability*
You go to Safeway. You buy a basket of goods. At the checkout counter, in the middle of your debit card purchase, you are waylaid by the following automated, electronic appeal: “Make a donation to women with breast cancer?” You donate a dollar out of your $287 purchase. Here are economic results for retail:
For every $1.193 million made in retail purchases, the retail value chain as a whole sends $1 to social programs. No wonder those minimum wage jobs are such a trap.
Out of your $287 purchase, the retail value chain as a whole sent $1 to oil and gas drilling that day. The retail trade sector does not include gas stations.
And we call ourselves the generous Americans? The good news is that for every $1 the grocery store spends on social programs, the value chain spends about another $1. That’s a 100% matching donation. But your cash register donation does not necessarily achieve that, since it is not necessarily considered a value chain transaction, but rather a direct donation from you. That’s a detail that I’m unsure of at this point, and would like input on from an economist. I can also look at direct donations to the social services sector and see whether your $1 actually goes farther as a direct donation. That would be good to know.
Let’s run some more retail numbers. Out of your $287 purchase, the value chain gave $2.29 to the credit card companies. No, that wasn’t the use of your credit card (remember I called this a debit transaction). It might be the use of corporate cards by retail management, not to mention all the promotions that you run across at the supermarket. Oh and your Macy’s card! And your JC Penneys card, let’s not forget that! Everytime you spend $287 on retail, you fund these things whether you use a credit card yourself or not. Meanwhile, a whopping $9.26 of your $287 purchase went to the previously booming real estate industry according to the value chain analysis. The data are from 1997. Gee, that was quite a bit!
Interrogate the numbers with me. What do you want to know? Remember as you ask that “Retail Trade” unfortunately covers all of retail under the federal government’s wise logic, so it’s impossible to separate say groceries from clothes, which would have been ideal from a social and environmental point of view. It does not include gas. Tell me what you think. What should I do with these numbers?
Meanwhile, I am entertaining my gentle readers while I work up my solar car value chain analysis. I’m downloading the entire dataset manually, then uploading it to a Google data store, and learning Java, too. Lots of new skills. I can get away with structural Java for now, since I don’t need to create object classes just yet. Nevertheless, it will take a little while, so please be patient with me and check back regularly! I also need to tweak the (hypothetical yet realistic) solar car project budget. If you have a valid reason for wanting to see that item-by-item budget, please leave a comment or contact me directly. It’s not too hard – I’m all over the web. Thanks!
p.s. Can’t forget the academic citation for these numbers:
Carnegie Mellon University Green Design Institute. (2009) Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) US Dept of Commerce 1997 Industry Benchmark (491) model [Internet], Available from: [Accessed 10 Jul, 2009]
*Numbers have been corrected since the evening of Thursday 7/9
Tags: credit cards, economics, environment, environmental justice, input-output models, oil and gas, real estate, retail trade, social justice, social programs, sustainability, value chains
