Building Healthy Communities

I spent the day today in a Home Depot store with an orange apron on, helping customers, sweeping the garden department and bringing carts in from the parking lot.  First,  I’ve got to say, that I am dirty and tired and my feet hurt.  Working retail is a tough job, and summer in Georgia makes it even tougher.  For any retail company,  the associates who work the sales floor every day are obviously the most important people in the company, and that is particularly true at the Home Depot where we have the best, most passionate associates bar none (sorry if I sound biased).  That of, course, is the point of having a paper pusher like me spend time pushing a broom and remembering how fortunate I am to return to my air conditioned office with a comfortable chair.

Given that the Foundation’s goal is to help people understand the long-term economic benefits of using more efficient, higher performing and durable products in their homes, today was also my chance to evangelize to consumers directly.  I planned to seize this opportunity to teach people that if they spend an extra buck today, they’ll save it many times over in reduced operating and maintenance costs.  What a great message! What an easy sell, right?

Well, it’s not really that simple or that easy - and I completely understand why.  Even with the most stereotypical example: the CFL lightbulb, the quintessential “green” product, the spiral bulb.  A CFL costs about $1.20 compared to a regular incandescent bulb, which costs about half of that.  (I feel the need to interject here that it is very unusual for a “green” product to cost twice what a traditional product costs.  In fact, we’ve found you can “green” an entire new home for well under $5,000 of added cost. ) According to the EPA’s Energy Star program, each CFL will save a homeowner about $30 over its lifetime and pay for itself in about 6 months because it uses 75 percent less energy.  On top of that, it lasts about 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb.  So spending that extra $0.60  today to save $30 overall should be a really simple, straight forward decision, right?

Well, sure, except when you go to reach for the bulb off the shelf.  It’s actually really hard to remember that long-term benefit when you have to pay for the lightbulb today because it’s… well, it’s long-term.  Especially, when you really came into the store to get just what you need to fix the leaky faucet or replace the lock or whatever else has to be done today.  If the necessities are already stretching you paycheck too far, or even if they aren’t, it’s hard to pay that incremental upfront cost now for the promise of a return in the future.  So I talked to some customers today about light bulbs and air filters and windows and how getting the right product will be a real win over its life time.  Not everyone listened.  But I did get a couple of people to buy into green.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Healthy, Affordable Housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.