Metrics to measure sustainability performance of retailing firm

Abstract

The aim of the project was to identify a set of metric that can be used by the retailers in order to evaluate their performance from a point of view of sustainability which includes economic, environmental and social impact of the firm. We have defined retailers as entities that are involved only in the retailing operations i.e. run stores like convenience stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets. The product can be ranging from groceries, fruits and vegetables to apparels, footwear and general merchandize. On the retail sustainability front in India, none of the retailers do any kind of reporting regarding the impact of their operations on the environment and the community. The central theme of the entire project was to evaluate the international best practices on sustainability and come up with a set of reporting parameters that will be specific to the retailers. In order to make it measurable and make the evaluation of retailers, we came up with a set of metrics that can be used for comparing the retailers on the sustainability front.