Attracting Business to Ethical Companies
By Mark Campbell
It is 1 Jan 2050 and I just got news that Exxon has gone into receivership. It is a sad day for many workers but almost all of them will be able to find meaningful work in a few weeks at companies that take much better care of their employees. I know this because almost all businesses take very good care of their employees and the environment these days. It is not like anyone is policing what they do but they just don’t get any business unless they are transparent and ethically responsible. It is surreal to think that I was a big part of creating the app that changed everything.
It started out as a way to list ethically and socially conscious businesses and products so that a group of us who were ethically and environmentally conscious could feel good about where we were spending our money. But when word spread, other people began to want access to this list. We decided to make it into a business and soon had over a million customers worldwide since our original group spanned the globe as well. As the customers grew the requests for different functions increased as well. We soon had so many features that an AI was added to simplify the interface.
I stare out the window in the passenger seat as the driverless car slows to a perfect stop in the parking lot of my local grocer. “How has this place been doing Jeeves?”. You get to personalize your own AI and I always liked the name Jeeves.
“If you are asking how this grocer is doing along the measures you have chosen then I would have to say very good. There is one pending grievance from an employee but it is relatively benign and I am still paying close attention. I have done a quick check on all of their suppliers and they are rating very high as well, especially in regards to fair trade. This grocer and ninety -eight percent of its suppliers are all rated high in radical transparency.”
Radical transparency was an important feature of the app since it gave prominence to the companies and products that told you everything about themselves, from how they sourced their materials to how much each employee was paid including all of the executives. If a company rated high in radical transparency they were featured regularly on the app while their membership fees were drastically reduced. The only other way to be featured highly on the app was to score high on the measures that mattered to the user. The user could change what was measured at any time.
We started with small companies first who quickly adopted the demands of radical transparency in exchange for the prominence it gained them on our network. Soon, more and more people started buying our customers’ products and doing business with them since radical transparency helped to quickly build trust in their products and services. As more and more companies signed on it became apparent that being on our network was helping them to gain a significant business advantage, especially when we introduced Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) stickers
The stickers we provided to the member companies have microscopic RFID tags built into them so that shoppers can locate products in the store and services on the map and read about them in our database. The global effect scale allows you to see how your purchasing habits are affecting the world and what the eventual benefits will be if those habits continue. The price of the stickers varies with the profit margin of the company, their ethical scores, and most of all their rating on the radical transparency scale. A struggling start-up that rated high in ethics and radical transparency would pay next to nothing to buy stickers from us while a larger company would pay much more.
As larger companies began to lose market share, many of them applied to become part of our network. Although we accepted some of them as members, only a few were willing to meet the minimum requirements of radical transparency. About half of those accepted companies worked diligently to improve their scores even though their stickers still cost hundreds of times what they cost the smaller companies. Over time, many of these larger, more progressive companies, were able to establish themselves as trusted entities as the more stubborn corporations wasted billions on advertising and lobbying.
Eventually, one by one, these larger companies began to fail. This included multinational banks and oil corporations as peer-to-peer financing and alternative energy companies received the bulk of new investments. Ironically, many of these same companies began to spend billions of dollars with our company and other ethical consultants in an effort to salvage what they could. These efforts came much too late however and only ended up accelerating the growth and spread of ethical consultants and our customer base on a global scale. Within fifteen years ninety percent of all service companies and producers had adopted radical transparency and ethical measures. The world had been changed forever as companies were forced to take much better care of their employees and only ethically responsible products sold regularly from store shelves.
As I enter the store Jeeves’s voice sounds in my earpiece. “The organic oatmeal has been moved to the third aisle near the southwest corner. There is also a new organic protein bar that fits nicely with your list of ideal ingredients and rates very highly in both grams of protein per bar and your global effect scale.”
“Excellent Jeeves hit me with the top two global effects of the protein bar.”
“The supplier hails from a relatively modest seaside neighborhood in Brazil. They devote ten percent of their profits to the cleanup of the shoreline and providing local education to reduce crime. Their efforts will contribute to a cleaner ocean and another friendly safe village in South America where you can windsurf since the light to moderate prevailing winds are perfect for your reduced capabilities.”
“Okay Jeeves, I don’t need you to tell me I am getting old but I love what those protein bar people are doing.”
It was the ability to find all the ingredients in any product from a distance that really sold people on the app but the other features weren’t bad either. I especially loved that I could turn on my personal app locator and instantly find others who were helping to change the world with their wallets. The people I met in the network so far were almost always interesting and kind.
My app pings to show me that a fellow app user just wants to chat. They are over by the organic eggs. I can hardly wait to meet them.