CSR

Put simply, Staples Soul reflects our commitment to corporate social responsibility. We believe there’s a close link between our financial success and our desire to make a positive impact on our associates, communities, and the planet. In other words, the more we give back, the more we’ll receive; think of it as building up a pile of good karma. The areas we place a lot of emphasis on include diversity, the environment, the communities we work in and our own ethics. You can find out more about the first two by following the links. But for now, let’s focus on community and ethics.

Community

We have a big presence in the communities we work in, and not because of the size of our stores. We want to help our customers and our own people get more out of life. How? One of our key Corporate initiatives is the Staples Foundation for Learning®. Its mission is to teach, train and inspire people from all walks of life by providing a range of educational and growth opportunities, and through it we have contributed to hundreds of non-profit organisations.

We also operate a range of local giving programmes, and here in the UK have built a close relationship with the charity Childline over the past few years. During that time, we’ve raised in excess of £338,000 for them through a mixture of national and local initiatives. For example, staff at our Eastbourne store dressed up as comic book heroes and villains for the day, raising a spandex-busting £500 in the process. Together, in 2006, we came up with the idea of creating a national ‘paperchain’ in every store in the run up to Christmas. Customers could purchase a link for £1, which would go to the charity. The links were displayed in stores until Boxing Day when they were collected for the ‘big count’. We also support the charity through an ink recycling initiative, where £1 is donated to Childline for every cartridge brought back to our store for recycling.

Ethics

Obviously, we want to be ethical in all our business practices. It’s not rocket science. We just treat people the way we would like to be treated; that applies to the way we handle our people, the way our people deal with our customers and the way we work with our suppliers. And we make sure that those suppliers source their products in a manner that protects workers’ human rights, workers’ health and safety, and the environment.