The company, with the support of its franchisees, has turned its shops into 'action stations' providing customers with information on the current campaign, and installing fax machines so that they can send their own messages to its targets. Every time we run a major campaign on human rights there is a major dip in sales because we are asking people to commit themselves to being active rather than to buying a product. She describes The Body Shop as 'part of the social responsibility movement'. The idea that business is responsible only to its shareholders mortifies me with its narrowness. Businesses are not found in nature, they are made by you and me, and so we can change the function of them.
Business has to be a force for social change.
Free trade was originally about the freedom of communities to trade equally with each other. It means that we can link together at the local level around the world and use our power as consumers to change business. Even more important, it means that we can start understanding each other in a way that no generation has managed before. Anita Roddick likes to call The Body Shop a ' multi-local business ' and describes how it trades directly with 38 'communities in need' in 21 countries. The firm it now deals with, Teddy Exports , employs some 500 people, mostly women, and mostly also formerly casual, unskilled agricultural labourers.