ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an overview of some key challenges, and opportunities for the retail sector to stimulate as well as adapt to a sustainability-oriented consumption. It focuses on several challenges that have turned out to be crucial to handle to move consumption in the direction towards sustainability based on an extensive review of the literature on the retailing-consumption relationship. The chapter refers particularly the pillars of sustainable development. They are ecological and social sustainability. Economic sustainability, is indirectly touched upon here, by recognizing its salience both among retailers and consumers, in parallel with ecological, social, and by extension governance-related, concerns. The most common issue that emerges when the retailer role for sustainable consumption is discussed concerns trustworthiness. There is a need for the retail sector to be responsive to the multifacettedness of sustainability concerns in society and among various consumer groups.