Reviewing "The Dark Side of Retailing" Journal

“The Bad News spreads Faster than Good News” this is most believed saying in the Retailing Arena.

Knowing what is bad for the business is most important for any business. The author of this journal is trying to find out which retail business practices lead to perceptions of corporate social irresponsibility (CSIR) from the customers ‘perspective and to develop a measurement scale for this construct. By using quantitative data from online survey, multi group confirmatory analysis, and real time interview and paper survey. Author has drilled down to demographic analysis on this research paper

The biggest drawback of this research paper is that author is focusing customer perspective of USA only, In addition to this paper was published in March 2007 by that time almost all retailers where globally expanded for instance Wal-Mart had 6779 stores around the globe (wal-mart 2007 annual report) in which they had only 3785 stores in USA, thus Wal-Mart is operating around 50% of its store apart from USA hence customer perspective towards CSIR difference from country to country, culture to culture and Person to Person.

The research identifies 14 factors which represents perception of CSIR in retailing, thru qualitative analysis from online survey and real time interview. Research team has coded each response am created correlation perspective from that they have identified to what extent the consumer regard the specific corporate behaviour thru correlation matrix. Finally author has ranked each CSIR from Consumer Perspective and derived demographic results to the findings.

Ranking	CSIR Consumer Perspective	Understanding on each Perspective
1	Societal rules	Cheating on taxes Paying bribes Ignoring the law Breaking the law
2	Employee discrimination	Discriminating employees based on race Discriminating employees based on gender Discriminating employees based on age Discriminating employees based on looks
3	Local working conditions	Having employees work in an unclean environment Having employees work in an unsafe environment Treating employees disrespectfully Providing poor working conditions to employees Not allowing employees to take sufficient breaks
4	Dishonesty	Making misleading claims to customers through advertising Having sales people make false claims to customers about products
5	Pricing policies	Overpricing products to customers Charging customers higher prices than originally advertised Charging customers high prices due to a monopolistic position
6	Natural environment	Selling products whose production harms the natural environmenta Producing extensive amounts of waste Contributing substantially to environmental pollution
7	Employee benefits	Providing very limited benefits to employees Providing very limited medical insurance to employees Making health-care coverage very expensive for employees Referring employees to health care provided by the state instead of providing medical insurance themselves
8	Foreign labour	Paying extremely low wages to workers in developing countries Having workers in developing countries work under very poor conditions
9	Employee wages	Paying very low wages to employees Not paying employees living wages Paying employees less than the market average Paying employees not more than minimum wage
10	Local businesses	Forcing local small businesses into bankruptcy Selling goods below cost to put local competitors out of business Creating a local monopolistic position for themselves Forcing local retailers into bankruptcy
11	Local employment	Increasing unemployment in local communities Replacing existing jobs with lower wage jobs in local communities Causing local businesses to reduce jobs in local communities Reducing their own workforce in local communities
12	Offensive material	Exposing customers to provocative images through advertising Exposing customers to products that are offensive to some people Exposing customers to products and images that are not family friendly
13	Foreign economies	Paying extremely low wages to workers in developing countries Having workers in developing countries work under very poor conditions
14	Sales practices	Selling customers products they cannot afford Selling customers products they do not really need Selling customers products that are bad for their health

Personal Review

Author found Societal rules is the most important issue as per Consumer Perspective and as per demographic findings its proven that most females are sensitive towards it, author has validated this by stating women’s personality traits tend to be less economically oriented and more philanthropically driven in comparison to men (Ibrahim and Angelidis, 1994). Since more retailers target market consists are women. Hence retailers need to be cautious about avoiding business practices which could potentially be interpreted as socially irresponsible.

I completely disagree as this findings are clearly based on media rather actual consumer perspective, yes media influence the consumer on the larger scale but not everybody presume what media shows. It’s completely redundant stating women’s are “less economically oriented and more philanthropically driven in comparison to men”. How often do you find shopper regardless of their gender stating “No Wal-Mart bribed the local officer to take the retail licence I will not shop in Wal-Mart here on”?.

To Conclude, Author has clearly stated in his research that the “Both the exploratory interviews and the quantitative main study are based upon convenience samples. While common in scholarly research of this kind, such samples do not facilitate making general inferences about a specific population in a strict statistical sense”. Hence needs additional evidence to enhance the findings. This Is the clear evidence that this research is paper is to gain knowledge and not decision making or this is not actual market scenario.