Long before curbside recycling, she sorted cans and stacked newspapers in the garage, then hauled them off somewhere. She harped on us about turning off the water when we'd brush. This was in the days of the TV commercial with the Indian crying over pollution, but my mom was no hippie. She's a former Girl Scout leader and Junior League president, reared by postwar parents who taught her not to be wasteful.
So I grew up a bit neurotic about that kind of stuff. During a perfectly enjoyable afternoon of shopping on the Plaza, for example, I'll descend into depression when I see stores with the air conditioning cranked and the doors wide open. Retailers might think this sends a big "Come on in!" message, but to me, it says: "Don't reward stupidity by helping pay their electric bill!"
It takes a willful obliviousness to leave your front door open when the AC's running.
Worried that I might be missing some reasonable justification for this practice, I called Dave Wagner, the manager of commercial and residential sales for Kansas City Power & Light. He knew what I was talking about and said it wasn't just a Kansas City phenomenon. He mentioned air-conditioned buildings with open doors in Las Vegas, which made me want to cry. "If you've got a door standing open, you have a big hole in the side of your building," he said. "From an energy standpoint, it is wasteful."
Last Tuesday around 1 p.m., with the temperature in the mid-80s and the humidity about that high, I took a cruise through the Plaza. I counted 20 stores with doors open: Restoration Hardware, American Eagle, Discovery Center, LattéLand, Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, The Limited, Bath & Body Works, J. Jill, Hudson & Jane, Eddie Bauer, MAC, Ann Taylor, N. Valentino, Classic Cup, Function Junction, Kaplan's, Kona Grill, the Children's Place. And, paradoxically, Images of Nature.
I imagined all of these doors open for a few hours a day all summer. And sometimes in the winter, with the heat blasting. And multiplied by every outdoor shopping mall in the country.
Then I called Bob Housh, who's the executive director of the Metropolitan Energy Center, a nonprofit that works to make Kansas City more energy-efficient.
When I told him about my observation, Housh joked, "It really keeps the sidewalks cool." Then he got serious. "There is not a big, overwhelming push to get stores to stop this. I think most people don't even think about it, as is the case with a lot of energy-related things."
Housh agreed to meet me on the Plaza a couple of days later. He brought along John Sommers, a mechanical engineer with Lenexa-based Henderson Engineers Inc.. Sommers is one of the engineers helping Wal-Mart green up. Wal-Mart's goal is to make its existing stores 25 percent more efficient and its new stores 30 percent more efficient. Sommers has been studying whether it would hurt Wal-Mart's business to put doors on refrigeration cases. He disputes the idea that open cases improve sales. "We're finding it really doesn't impact the impulse buys," he told me.
We set out on a sweaty walk. Sommers kept pulling at the front of his knit polo to get a little breeze inside his shirt. "This is a pushing-design day," he said, which was mechanical-engineer speak for a hot day that strains a building's cooling system.
Sure enough, several stores had open doors.
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I couldn't agree with you more! And it is so irritating to me. If enough people get together to sign a petition, maybe we could get the Plaza stores to end their "open door" policies...
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