Take heed, Tesco

Tesco should take heed.
The idea that companies should be responsible in their pursuit of profit is now a given for most businesses.
It was not always so.
Around 25 years ago, Milton Friedman, the US Nobel Prize-winning economist, expounded the corporate view that profit was all that mattered.
Today, however, many companies routinely publish reports on social responsibility, sustainability, and the environment.
This is not just – or even at all – about altruism.
Profit and principle are bound up as never before.
The language of the fast buck is dying out in top boardrooms. It should be dying out faster, and, it would seem, one company that still needs to listen a little harder as the dinosaurs come crashing down in the forest is Tesco. After all, every little helps, as they say.
Its active investors have already kicked up over big boss Sir Terry Leahy’s recently proposed pay package, but something even closer to home has struck me – it was a hand-scribbled, ever-so-hopeful note on a scarp of paper that has been stuck to the window of a disused shop next to Bermondsey's Jubilee line Tube station in London SE.
It says simply: “Tesco shop – coming soon”.
As it’s taped to the outside of the window, it doesn't appear to have been put there by someone with any access.
As it’s in cheap crayon, it’s not likely to be an official note from Britain’s most successful supermarket chain heralding a ground breaking move into the Bermondsey boondocks.
What it is, is the best example of wishful thinking I’ve seen for a long while.
I’m no particular fan of Tesco (it's long irked me that they can count so much of the shrapnel and folding stuff that comes out of our purses and wallets in their tills), but this tiny plea from a south London local says to me that there are people in localities like this that feel all but shunned by Big Brand and would love to see the teeniest weeniest small gesture – a Tesco Express perhaps – that might just give them access to things they can't get anyhere else on the Jamaica Road or at least a mile or two either side of it.
After all their lives are no less worthy than those of the population of St John’s Wood or the City. So why doesn't Tesco think outside the box and spend some of that enormous profit investing in the less lucrative, but just as hungry markets, like many that can be found all over Britain and not just in the SE postcodes?
It would show that the bosses haven't lost sight of their business's roots (a market stall in lowly Bethnal Green) and that they are really concerned about social responsibility, sustainability, and the environment.
Fingers crossed.