Mgt521 - Kudler Fine Foods

Abstract

Kudler Fine Foods is a gourmet grocery store experiencing significant growth. The company is expanding services, improving efficiency, and developing strategies to get the customer into the store more often, and to spend more while in the store. This paper outlines how this writer’s management style would align with Kudler’s environment using the results of the Williams Institute Ethics Awareness Inventory assessment (EAI).

Current Situation

The Kudler Fine Foods Company is an established and successful company dealing in specialty food products and services. It plans to expand into additional locations, markets with differing demographics, and product and service lines. The company is a family business, meaning it is not part of a conglomerate or large commercial grocery chain. The company was founded and currently managed by Mrs. Kathy Kudler. Being a small family business, Kudler’s strives to expand while retaining the values of a family business. The identified inefficiencies and waste in the stores operations that may endanger expansion, profitability, and customer relations and increasing competition in their core markets create pressure to compromise ethics in the name of expediency.

Ethical Concepts

This writer’s ethical concepts stated simply are to: “Do what’s right as opposed to what’s expedient, every time.” Admittedly, there are often short term difficulties with such a strategy, but there are business advantages after that. As a manager at Kudler’s the author believes that both employees and customers will value a company that does what’s right and ethical every time and will reward it with not only their loyalty, continued business, and recommendations to others as well.

Internal

As managers, one of the highest priority responsibilities is to train and instill ethical values in the employees. The expansion into differing areas means hiring a diverse workforce that shares cultural ties with the community the store is...