Green Is the New Low Carb Fad and Plastic Bag Bans Create Mandated Eco Heroes

Green retailing is an emerging trend that is being embraced wholeheartedly by some U.S. retailers that are committed to making an eco-friendly impact on the world. For others, "greenwashing" is the way to align their retail operation with the green movement without actually making any substantive contributions to it.

Green retailing walks. Greenwashing talks. This is how consumers can tell the difference between retailers who are sincere environmental advocates and those who consider "green" to be just another retail fad to glom onto.

The low-carb craze was the last monster retail fad that seemed to deeply infiltrate the minds of consumers. Seemingly overnight U.S. consumers came to universally believe that low-carb equals lower weight, lower weight equals better health, therefore low-carb equals better health. So the logic went for the fattest country on the planet, a logic that created an intense retailing craze that many food suppliers and U.S. retailers are still profiting from today.

My favorite example of low-carb insanity was a bag of pork rinds that had prominent placement on the special “low carb/diet” section of my grocery store. While it is true that the deep-fried skin of a pig has little or no carbohydrate content, I have never seen pork rinds on anybody’s healthy eating food chart. But the low-carb delusion was one that food retailers were willing to participate in and perpetuate as long as the low-carb train was headed to Profitville.

“Green” is now the new low-carb. Green is good for the planet, consumers are happy to help the planet, therefore consumers should be happy with anything labeled by a retailer as “green.” And so the exploitation of the newest craze begins. But just because a retail store carries products that look green, sound green, and get special green signage on the special green shelves, doesn’t mean that the retailer bragging about their green merchandise offerings is green-motivated at all.

Plastic bags are a hot green retailing topic. Personally I will be glad when stores – particularly grocery stores - stop using plastic bags. I have always found them to be the most flimsy, inefficient, customer-unfriendly method for toting merchandise – particularly groceries – available to mankind. So, yes, it is good that plastic bags are leaving both the retail scene and the environment for many reasons.

Here’s my question… Who decided plastic bags were a good idea in the first place? Retailers who were completely unconcerned about the environment made plastic bags the standard because they were much more concerned about their own bottom line. So, please excuse me if I hold my applause for the elimination of a retailing practice that was started by ecologically irresponsible retailers in the first place.

Whole Foods is a genuine green retailer that set the green standard for bagging long ago. They have encouraged the recycling and reuse of bags for as long as I have been shopping there, and they have been paying back the customers who bring their own bags for years. They didn’t start their reuse-recycle practices because it was the hip green trend of the day, they did it because one of their core values is to “care about our communities and the environment.”

From a consumer point of view, the Whole Foods standard is much different than the ride-the-green-train retailers who are charging customers for bags – like IKEA and Marks & Spencer – or using the green movement as an excuse to sell expensive logo-plastered tote bags like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.

In 2004 countries around the world starting taxing and banning the use of plastic bags in retailing. In 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban the use of plastic shopping bags. China's 1.3 billion shoppers haven't seen a plastic bag since before the Beijing Olympics. In six months, the city of Los Angeles will be plastic bag free.

It’s interesting that plastic bags are disappearing from the retail scene because governments are forcing them to. This is because few global retailers have moved an inch towards alternate bagging materials without the motivation of external force. And yet, as they make the government-mandated eco-friendly change to their retail operations, it will be interesting to watch retailers proudly declare themselves “green.” Mandated compliance is a celery-tinted move at best, and doesn’t really deserve full-blown green respect.

Green retailing is a positive thing. And if the only way the planet can get green is through government coercion or fad exploitation, then so be it. The retail industry should be concerned, however, with how long the public will be fooled by those retailers who are passing out green-colored glasses with one hand and reaching into shoppers’ wallets with the other hand to finance their own green image. Not long enough, I predict. Because already “retailers who care about something besides money” is starting to be the new “green.”