A very jolly green outing yesterday threw today - Black Friday - into even sharper perspective. Habitat Aid made it into the top 50 green businesses in the West and I toddled up to Bristol for a prize giving event.
It's always nice to meet the kind of enthusiastic people who were there, even though it makes me feel like I'm a very weary 150. There was a tremendous range of businesses represented. You can be doing all sorts of things and be "green". There were sandwich makers, printers, water companies, PR companies, banks. These were companies in traditional areas doing things in a more sustainable way or promoting/servicing "green" companies.By the end of the evening I wasn't even sure what "green" meant.
At the other end of the spectrum were businesses firmly entrenched in recycling, alternative energy - you can imagine the kind of thing. I think my favourite firm was
Geneco, quite rightly one of the winners. Oddly - which gave me pause for thought - we were the only people doing anything
directly related to the natural environment. There's money in all this other stuff but not in
plants. *Sigh*.
Anyway, it was a genuinely inspiring evening, and in sharp contrast to Black Friday today. Where did this wretched nonsense come from? It leaves me with the same kind of unpleasant taste as the Sunday Times Rich List. Are we come to this? It would be nice to think it will die a death.
I'm pretty confident that millenials will lead a move away from price driven consumerism and value ethical businesses more and more. As one such, it's our challenge to provide them with choice and reasonable prices. We simply can't provide the same slick level of service that Amazon does, but it's my hope that customers increasingly value the quality of our products and how we source them.
