Cold Facts

My mom used to yell at us for staring into the refrigerator with the door open.

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.

At Eddie Bauer's entrance on Nichols Road, one door was wide open. Cool air flowed out onto the sidewalk, so we stopped to enjoy it.

"They're throwing it away!" Sommers said of Eddie Bauer's air conditioning.

He and Housh were being extremely good sports, walking around the sweltering Plaza and talking about plain common sense.

"Over the last six or eight months, we've had a lot of calls from retail clients wondering what they can do, because there's a heightened awareness of global warming," Sommers said. He noted that businesses are beginning to understand they can use their green status as a marketing tool.

At Restoration Hardware, double-doors were agape at the store's east entrance; just inside, a display of patio furniture made a smooth transition for customers strolling in from the heat, unobstructed by anything as oppressive as a door. Farther inside, fake antique fans — evocative of those carefree days when none of us had to worry about global warming — were all turned on, blowing the A/C back toward the open doors.

This was bad.

"I'll be eager to see what the store managers say," Housh said as we headed back toward the Classic Cup, where he and Sommers stayed to have lunch.

At my office, I made some calls.