PETCO Develops Successful Stakeholder Relationships - Case Study Example

The third section of the article dealt with risks associated with the pet industry. The article mentioned that a single negative incident of animal neglecting, abuse, or mistreatment can taint the public image of a firm in this industry such as PETCO. The nest two sections of the article dealt specifically with PETCO discussing its ethical program and philanthropic initiatives. The article ended with PETCO recommendations and accomplishments. Answers to the three questions from the article are illustrated below. 1) How has Petco’s ethics and compliance program helped it deal with ethical misconduct?

The ethics & compliance program has helped PETCO a lot to deal with ethical issues that occur while doing business. Ethics can be defined as a system of moral principles that deals with decisions of right or wrong (Reference, 2011). The ethics program states that the company should treat the animals with utmost care and it should respect the customer’s privacy. The code of ethics addresses other areas including selling, advertising, pricing, and buying practices. Based on the ethics program the company the employee cannot push a sale on a customer for a particular brand, since the employees are supposed to explain the pros and cons of each brand so that the customer can make an informed decision on their own.

The company implemented correction action measures whenever harassment and mistreatments occurs in the company to either humans or animals. Ethical decisions are influenced by organizational culture (Ferrel, et. al, 2011). The ethics program of the firm also addresses drug abuse, asset protection, and violence in the workplace. The organization has implemented measures for associate, vendor, and customer protection. Conflict of interest scenarios have been included in the code of ethics which provides guidelines for the employees when they are faced with these types of situations.

If the customer is involved in a potential conflict of interest the employees are supposed to relay the information to the manager so that the manager can make the final decision on how to proceed and fix the situation. The employees of the company are prohibited from receiving gifts from suppliers, vendors, or customers. Supervisors and their immediate family are not supposed to invest in vendor companies without prior approval from PETCO’s ethics committee. The code of ethics also addresses concerns such as employee safety, wage laws and reporting time worked.

The supervisors are supposed to act as role model for the organization. 2) How do you think re-privatizing the company will help PETCO’s performance? Or do you think it hurt the company overall? The decision to turn PETCO from a public company back to a private firm in my opinion was not warranted. The re-privatizing decision did not add any value to the organization. By privatizing the company the firm lost its ability to raise large sums of capital through the sale of common stocks in the open market.

Public companies have greater recognition in the market and the fact they are listed on major public exchanges such as NYSE creates free word of mouth advertising for the company. I thought it was unethical when the company re-privatized and it did follow a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandate that was pending because once the company stopped being public the SEC had no jurisdiction over them. The case study did not show any specific