Wal-Mart Going Fair Trade?
Photo by Ylan Mui/The Washington Post
From the Washington Post: “For Wal-Mart, fair trade may be more than a hill of beans.”
Rosevaldo Jose Pereira has never been to Wal-Mart. The name doesn’t mean anything to the lifelong coffee farmer in this remote village in southeastern Brazil.
But Wal-Mart Stores Inc. knows who he is. And the world’s largest retailer is changing his life.
Wal-Mart is overhauling its tightfisted image to win over shoppers searching for more than low prices. The effort has taken the company away from its high-volume methods and into one of its most radical undertakings: seeking fair trade coffee, a journey that’s taken them to co-op coffee farms in Brazil.
Wal-Mart is in the midst of overhauling its tightfisted image to win over shoppers searching for more than low prices. That effort has taken the company that built an empire on the principle of high volume and low costs into previously uncharted territory, into the realm of trendy apparel and organic food.
Now, with the help of Pereira, it is embarking on one of its most radical undertakings to date: fair trade.
Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, raises a caveat, however: “The most common complaints about Wal-Mart—that it runs out small businesses and lowers prices and wages to unsustainable levels—do not disappear just because the merchandise changes.”
leslie mile said,
April 1, 2007 at 1:07 pm
FAIR TRADE!!!!!!!!!