Pollution Accounting for Corporate Actions: Quantifying the Air Emissions and Impacts of Transportation System Choices Case Study: Food Freight and the Grocery Industry in Los Angeles

Credible corporate commitments to environmental and sustainability outcomes build upon reasonable estimates of corporate impacts and realistic plans to ameliorate those impacts. Although many companies have already begun to account for their goods movement emissions, the vast majority of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosures do not. This report creates and critically evaluates two complementary accounting mechanisms for air pollution emissions resulting from local transportation systems—for use in ESG disclosure and impact mitigation planning. These mechanisms are applied to a case study of businesses involved in food freight in Los Angeles: demonstrating the scope of local goods movement impacts on air quality and climate, and paving a path for additional analyses to follow. By quantifying the scope of impact from certain business and supply chain operations, this analysis makes the case for enhanced corporate responsibility by documenting and then reducing transportation system emissions from supply chain and logistics systems.

Effects of Contemporary Leadership Styles and Employee Engagement on Customer Satisfaction in the Retail Grocery Industry in the US

Competition within the retail grocery industry has reached an all-time high. Organizations looking to differentiate themselves from rivals are focusing on improved customer satisfaction. This quantitative research study investigated how customer satisfaction was related to contemporary leadership styles and employee engagement. Transactional leadership theory, transformational leadership theory, and charismatic leadership theory were used as the theoretical framework of the study. Regression analyses were conducted to determine the effect of contemporary leadership styles on employee engagement in addition to determining the extent of the relationship existing with customer satisfaction. The results of the study indicated both transactional leadership and transformational leadership positively impacted or increased employee engagement; however, transformational leadership proved to be a significantly higher predictor of employee engagement.

Centralized and Decentralized Warehouse Logistics Collaboration

Problem definition: We bound the value of collaboration in a decentralized multisupplier multiretailer setting, where several suppliers ship to several retailers through a shared warehouse, and outbound trucks from the warehouse contain the products of multiple suppliers. Academic/practical relevance: In an emerging trend in the grocery industry, multiple suppliers and retailers share a warehouse to facilitate horizontal collaboration, lower transportation costs, and increase delivery frequencies. Thus far, these so-called mixing and consolidation centers are operated in a decentralized manner, with little effort to coordinate shipments from multiple suppliers with shipments to multiple retailers. Facilitating collaboration in this setting would be challenging (both technically and in terms of the level of trust that would be necessary), so it is useful to understand the potential gains of collaboration. Methodology: We extend the classic one-warehouse multiretailer analysis to incorporate multiple suppliers and per-truck outbound transportation cost from the warehouse and develop a cost lower bound on centralized operation as benchmark. We then analyze decentralized versions of the system, in which each retailer and each supplier maximizes his or her own utility in a variety of settings, and we analytically bound the ratio of the cost of decentralized to centralized operation to bound the loss resulting from decentralization. Results: We find analytical bounds on the performance of several decentralized policies. The best, a decentralized zero-inventory ordering policy, has a cost ratio when compared with a lower bound on the centralized policy of no more than 3/2. In computational studies, we find that costs of decentralized policies are even closer to those of centralized policies. Managerial implications: Easy-to-implement decentralized policies are efficient and effective in this setting, suggesting that centralization (and thus a potentially complex and expensive coordination effort) is unlikely to result in significant benefits.

The Market Inscribed Landscape: An Institutional Logic of Food Deserts

Focusing on the institutional logics of the grocery industry, this paper argues that the “neighborhood effects” of a lack of resources provided by organizations to economically disadvantaged areas are moderated by institutional logics. From the 1930s to early 1970s, the grocery industry had a logic of “economies of scale.” A new “mix–margin” logic developed after the mid–1970s: using low margins on high–demand items to gain foot traffic needed to sell high–margin items. Using company–specific store location data (from 1970 to 1983), this paper analyzes whether differences in company philosophy affect their presence in economically disadvantaged zip codes. Results show that supermarkets were less likely to locate in economically disadvantaged zip codes when operating under a mix–margin philosophy. These results indicate a shift to a “mix–margin” institutional logic corresponded with an exodus from economically disadvantaged areas by the grocery industry after the mid–1970s.