Sustainability in the Turkish retailing industry

Abstract

AbstractRetailing is a diverse and dynamic industry offering a wide range of goods and services to consumers.There is also an increasing recognition that this corporate retail power is the driving force for the whole of the supply chain. Due to these facts, it is argued that retailing companies have a huge potential to impact on sustainability performance of national economies. In order to materialize this potential, performance in sustainability should be assessed, and evaluating sustainability performance of an industry requires developing a system of performance evaluation framework. In the context of sustainable development, selecting proper sustainability indicators are one of the most crucial steps to fulfill performance evaluations. Since there has been no attempt to develop proper sustainability indicators in retailing industry, this paper aims to select appropriate indicators for future evaluation of industrial sustainability performance for grocery retailing in terms of three sustainability aspects: social, environmental and economic. To this end, (1) a comprehensive analysis of the existing literature was done, (2) and Analytic Hierarchy Process/Weighted Additive model‐based table was developed to rank the indicators for each aspect, (3) the input for the tables was obtained from rapidly growing grocery retailing industry in Turkey by conducting surveys, and (4) using the average values of the tables, sustainability indicators for each aspect were ranked and the most appropriate ones were selected. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.