Study goals
The present study aims to analyze socio-environmental practices in supermarkets in the Alta Paulista region, northwest of the State of São Paulo.
Relevance / originality
Moravcikova et al. (2017) state that six out of ten companies will invest in sustainable initiatives. Regardless of size, companies are recognizing the benefits of going green (Lu, Bock & Joseph, 2013). Therefore, being sustainable is a necessary element and an inevitable cost for the functioning of a company
Methodology / approach
To verify the proposed objective, a descriptive research was carried out, with a qualitative approach, through a multiple case study, in which two supermarkets in the Alta Paulista region were studied. Thus, the first stage of the research was constituted from the bibliographic survey. This search provided theoretical support for the research. The second stage of the research was characterized in case planning. In this stage, the units of analysis were chosen. The choice of stores is justified, as they are part of supermarket chains. And also for the access and willingness of companies to participate in the research. In this phase, the methods and techniques for data collection and analysis were also determined. For the third stage, data collection, the technique chosen was the interview, for which purpose a form was created with open questions. The form was based on the main socio-environmental practices of the three largest supermarket chains present in Brazil: GPA, Carrefour and, Walmart.
Main results
It was possible to observe that in the researched cases, the environmental and social aspects are treated in a declared way in the company policy and there is a concern for the environmental impacts to be reduced, which was demonstrated with the practice of separating products for recycling and with the search for the efficient use of resources, for example.
Theoretical / methodological contributions
Despite being a qualitative research, the method used proved to be efficient to achieve the proposed objective. In this way, the study allowed to observe that, in the descriptive research when the procedures are performed within the procedures required by the method, the results can be valuable.
Social / management contributions
The results demonstrate that the socio = environmental practices adopted by the supermarket retailer bring relevant contributions to the company, society and the environment. They also demonstrate that the returns in marketing and finance outweigh the investment costs.