Hyperfixed: Dylan's Supermarket Cold Case
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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Look, we've all got problems. Sometimes your problem is a massive roadblock in your life. Or maybe it's this little thing that quietly annoys you that you've learned to grudgingly put up with. But regardless of the size of your problem, it would be so great if someone would just fix it for you. And not just fix it, hyperfix it.

On his new podcast, Hyperfixed, host Alex Goldman will get to the bottom of your problem, no matter how big or small. If there is a bottom, results may vary. You may remember Alex as the former co-host of Reply All. When a 99PI listener couldn't play the show on his Mazda car stereo, Alex and his super tech support team helped us track down the issue and create a special Mazda-friendly podcast feed, which we still publish to today. So imagine what he could do for you.

Today, we're playing a great story from Alex in his new show. It's very much a design story. He investigates why there's no door in a place where there really should be a door. You'll never shop for sour cream or shredded mozzarella the same way again. Enjoy. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman. This is Hyperfixed. On this show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them. Or, I mean, at least I try to. And if I don't, at least I have a good reason why I can't.

This week, Dylan's supermarket cold case. As a person who is close to the grocery store, do you find yourself going like, Oh, every day. Really? You're there every day? Every day I bop over there, milk, you know, to this morning I need milk, boom. This is Dylan. He lives across the street from a Safeway, and as you heard...

He goes there every day. What are you often getting at the store? Man, definitely milk and cereal, bagels, all the breakfast food to eat every meal of the day. What kind of cereal do you rock with? Today it was Captain Crunch, but normally it's like bran flakes. And because Dylan is making so many visits to Safeway, he's constantly confronted by this thing.

This thing that most people probably wouldn't even question. But Dylan says he's been thinking about it for a long time, actually. And he just didn't have anyone to ask about it.

Until I came along. I can't quite remember what I sent you guys, but the gist of it is like, you go to the grocery store and it's unlike every other place on earth, their fridges don't always have like doors, right? And you would think that from just like an energy perspective, you would put a door in front of your fridge to not lose all your energy you're putting into cooling it. Okay, this is a great point.

It's one that I make to my kids every time I catch them leaving the refrigerator door open at home. I'm like, what are you doing? Were you raised in a barn? You're letting all the cold air out. But for some reason, when I'm in a grocery store and I see row after row of open refrigeration units letting all the cold air out, it doesn't even register to me as a problem. Additionally, like the store has like a heating system, right? So it's like cooling the fridge air, but then it's heating the store air and it seems like a big waste. And waste is not just some casual concern for Dylan.

He co-leads a climate group in Portland, and in his free time, he lobbies Congress about environmental issues. So definitely a big concern of mine is just like the climate environment. I don't always know the specific science behind like, you know, like why does a store have this refrigeration unit? It does not seem very effective. So that is why Dylan came to us.

First, to figure out whether this whole open refrigeration system is really as wasteful as it seems. And second, if it is really that wasteful, why do grocery stores continue to be designed this way? Have you taken any steps to, like, figure out why they are designed this way? Zero steps taken. I just reached out to you. I feel like...

Even though I've never, never spoken it aloud, it's like been in my head. So it's nice to know that someone else is thinking about it. And someone else is thinking about it to a degree that like, you know, I think about the dumb questions I have. I'm excited to try and answer this. After my call with Dylan, I drove to my local stop and shop for some research, which is what I call snacks. And as I walked around the store carrying a bag of Cool Ranch flavored research under my arm, I felt like I was really seeing the place for the first time.

More than half of the refrigerated section was completely left open. There were no doors or plastic flaps covering even the most perishable food like yogurt and eggs. And later, when I went to Trader Joe's for more research, I saw that even the ice cream was being kept in open cooling units. Which, given what happens to the ice cream at my house when I accidentally leave the freezer open even a little bit, feels especially insane. None of this made sense to me.

From a cost and energy standpoint, the whole design of the stores seemed so obviously inefficient. But the fact that they were all designed this way made me think there must be some other factor that made this make sense. Most of you probably know that I came from tech journalism. And I learned the reason that a lot of software is designed the way it is, is to try and manipulate the end user to continue using it or use things a certain way.

They call it dark patterns. And as I was heading out of the store, I couldn't stop thinking about this idea that all these costly and inefficient refrigeration systems were trying to cajole people into a certain way of shopping. I just needed to find out what that certain way is.

So I called a grocery store designer named Dan Phillips. And he was very much not the dark patterns mastermind I expected to find. I think everyone has their own creative outlet. Some do art, some paint, some play music. And laying out a store is kind of an art. It's a thought process. Dan's family has been in the grocery store design business since 1972.

He's super passionate about the work. And when I told him about my dark patterns theory of open refrigeration systems, he was like, okay, first of all,

That's not what they're called. So if you go into a grocery store, you'll go to the produce department and they'll have that case on the wall that's refrigerated with a bunch of shelves on it. That is called an open-air multi-deck. If you didn't catch that, Dan says these refrigerated shelves are called open-air multi-decks. Open because they're exposed to the elements, in this case, the cool air of the supermarket environment. And multi-deck because the shelving is tiered to display rows and rows of produce and goods.

The second thing he told me was that my whole dark patterns theory was way off, at least in his experience. Dan primarily works with mom-and-pop shops, not Safeway-style supermarkets. But he says that when his clients are trying to decide what goes behind a refrigerator door and what doesn't, their primary consideration is customer experience. There are some products that work and some just don't. It works to put beer behind doors.

You know, because you can sit there and you know what beer you're going to get, right? And you can grab it out. Things like dairy and hot dogs also work great behind a door because you don't really need to examine them. Typically, you spot the label you like, open the door, pull it out, and you're done. For the produce and packaged meat, you know, those doors would be a hindrance there.

You know, people will want to hold that open with their cart and look at all the different cuts of prime rib that is there. I never considered the idea that you'd have to stand there with the door open. But like now I'm thinking about the things that I get out of the freezer, which are chicken nuggets for my daughter, ice cream, all things that like I know I am fully aware of what it's going to taste like. There's not going to be any surprises. It's not going to have, you know, brown spots. It's not going to be a thing that I have to examine.

Dan says that if you want to see good customer experience, design and action,

The best place to go is Costco. Going to Costco is one of my favorite experiences of all time because you can really see customer interaction and flow in a Costco store. Just stand at the end of the frozen food aisle and kind of see how fast people are going in and out of that. And then go stand over by the meat department and just stand in the corner and watch how long people stand in the meat department and see how they interact and go through things and pick things up. And you'll see, okay, here's what doors do and here's what open multi-decks do.

Here's the products that are working and don't work. And honestly, it just comes down to making sure that you all are having an enjoyable experience so you come back. No sort of trickery. We just want you to come back and shop the independent store and not go down the streets.

Dan conceded that his work was driven more by the ideals of a good customer experience than raw dollars and cents data. And I conceded that, yeah, okay, I enjoy examining my meats and cheeses, and putting them behind a door would be a bit of a pain in the ass. By the time I said goodbye to Dan, the idea of open multidecks didn't seem quite as crazy anymore. But that was before I found out exactly how much energy these multidecks are using. ♪♪

There's another Dan in this episode, and we are trying to figure out ways to differentiate the two of you. I was wondering if you would be okay if we called you Science Dan. Well, I do prefer Daniel to Dan, but I'm happy for you to call me Science Daniel, or you call me whatever you like. Science Daniel. Perfect. This is Science Daniel, a.k.a. Daniel Whiteson.

He's a professor of physics at UC Irvine and the host of a Science Explainer podcast called Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, which has nothing to do with refrigeration. But when I found a paper on the very question we'd set out to answer, and surprisingly, there's a lot of scientific literature on this particular question,

I felt like I needed a set of seasoned science eyes to give it a look. I do read a lot of science papers, and it's definitely something you learn how to do. It's like reading a science fiction book. You're like, okay, here comes this bit. Okay, here comes that bit. I need to skim that. Or this part I need to read really carefully. So it's definitely a skill. It's like a muscle. The paper I sent Science Daniel was from 2015. It's titled, The Energy Efficiency Paradox, colon, A Case Study of Supermarket Refrigeration System Investment Decisions.

And all I wanted to know was, okay, what gives? These open multi-decks are in every store. Can they really be as wasteful as Dylan imagines they are? The fridges are using a huge amount of energy. It's more than 50% of the total cost of the energy of the supermarket.

market. You know, they're like running bakeries, they got lights, they got all sorts of stuff going on in the supermarket. But a huge fraction comes from refrigerating that food and running those freezers. It costs a lot of energy to keep that stuff cold, especially if you don't have doors on it. So yeah, these things are expending a ton of energy. But he also told me the design of the open multi-deck is not the same as when my kids leave the fridge door open at home. It is designed to be more efficient than that.

These open door fridges are not totally stupid. It's not just like you take your fridge at home and you remove the door. That wouldn't work very well. A lot of these do have specialized techniques where they like blast the cold air in a wall to use the laminar flow to try to prevent the warm air from leaking in. But still, even all the fancy techniques, etc., you could save at least 30% of the energy cost just by putting doors on these. And I spoke to some climate experts here at UC Irvine, and they estimated that that was a low figure.

that with new refrigerators that are much more efficient and well-sealing doors, that number could be at least 50 or maybe even 70 percent. So it's huge. I read one paper that suggested that the whole country would save like one or two percent of our energy costs for the whole country. I can't stress that enough. Just by putting doors on the fridges. Science Daniel told us that if grocery stores made the switch from open-air multidecks

to fridge doors, they could save big money in the billions of dollars over the lifetime of these fridges across the entire grocery industry. Now I am not a math or science guy,

But my understanding is that a billion is a pretty big number. And many billions together is a much bigger number than that. And it's not just that it costs a lot of money to maintain open-air multidecks. As Science Daniel explains, The fact that you want to be able to reach you for your yogurt pops without going through a door is costing us a lot of money and polluting the environment.

It's a big deal. Now, the details are important, though. Like what we're talking about here is energy use and the impact on the climate depends on where that energy comes from. So if your supermarket was, for example, completely powered by windmills, then it wouldn't cost anything for the environment to use more of that energy. But if you are burning coal or natural gas or whatever, which is still like 60 percent of our energy here in the U.S.,

then yeah, the more power you draw, the more coal they burn, and your yogurt pots are warming the whole planet. Oh, and there's one more thing that we didn't even consider. That clever design that Science Daniel was describing earlier that allows open multi-decks to run more efficiently than my home's fridge, that's because they use refrigerants.

And refrigerants are very bad for the environment, worse than CO2 in a lot of cases. And even on the best refrigeration unit, those refrigerants leak. These refrigerants themselves are really, really bad greenhouse gases. CO2 is a bad greenhouse gas, even though it's a tiny fraction of the Earth's atmosphere. But there are other gases like methane or more complex organic molecules that are even worse, that smaller amounts of can heat up the planet much more.

And I read a study from the CBC that said that the environmental impact was equivalent to the emissions of burning billions and billions of pounds of coal, like basically running an extra 150 coal power plants full time. OK, so it's clear that Dylan was right in more ways than he was even aware of. The current refrigerator system at grocery stores has real environmental impacts.

So why aren't grocery stores making the switch if it could save them money and be better for the environment? After the break, I take that question directly to the source. We're back with more from Alex Goldman and Hyperfixed.

So, before the break, I found out just how wasteful these open multi-deck systems can be. Which brought me back to the question we started with. Why do so many grocery stores use them? I had a theory that there had to be some ulterior motive, some dark pattern that would make this make sense. And the only people who could say for sure were the owners of Dylan's Neighborhood Safeway, Mr. and Mrs. Albertson. You know, because of how Safeway is owned by Albertsons.

Anyway, I don't know if that joke lands or not. Albertson's doesn't list contact information for any of their department heads. So I decided to call Albertson's main office. For calling Albertson's companies in Boise, Idaho, please choose from the following menu options. For current or prospective suppliers, press 5. Whoa, just hung up on me. Even after I called back, I couldn't get anybody. There's not even a voicemail box.

So we tried calling their corporate office. "If you are calling about your grocery delivery or pickup, please press 8." They directed me to their head of marketing.

She was on vacation. So we reached out to Kroger, Costco, Whole Foods. By the way, did you know there's only like five brands controlling all the major grocery stores in the United States? It's true. Also true is that none of those brands got back to me.

Finally, I wrote an email explaining everything I'd learned and sent it to Big Grocery. But as of publication time, I have not heard back. So while I'd answered one of Dylan's questions, I knew exactly how wasteful these open multidecks were, I still didn't know why they continued using them. And the supermarkets were not helping. But the clock was ticking. And if I couldn't take this question straight to the source, I thought the next best thing was Paco Underhill, the author of the book Why We Buy, The Science of Shopping.

When you're walking through a store, not as a consultant, but just as a customer,

Is it like the end of the Matrix when Neo sees all the green text? I'm imagining you being able to see the code behind every product placement decision in a place like that. Well, I think part of what is very interesting is that the local grocery store manager is tired of me giving him advice. Paco runs a consulting firm called EnviroCell that counts nearly half of all Fortune 100 companies as its clients.

And the reason they've been able to amass such a prestigious portfolio is because they have this uncanny ability to go into a space, be it a bank or a retail space or a restaurant, and almost immediately identify its inefficiencies. Part of what made us very, uh,

The reason they're so good at this is because once they go into a space, they collect tons of data. They use everything from cameras and interviews to eye-tracking glasses that record the ways your eyes react to different stimuli as you walk around a certain environment.

They even have what they call trackers, which are people who just skulk around the store trying not to be noticed as they watch people shop. And once they get all that data, they analyze it using the principles of environmental psychology, which is what Paco studied in grad school. So I was hopeful that if anyone knew the hidden reason behind why supermarkets were using these wildly inefficient refrigeration systems, it was Paco. And he did. It just wasn't nearly as sexy as I wanted it to be.

Well, part of what you need to realize here is that the basic design of a grocery store was done in the 1930s. So, the reason grocery stores are designed this way is not for efficiency and not for return on investment. It's simply because that's the way they've been designed for nearly 100 years, and we are so used to it now, no one has bothered to update it. The physical design of the store and choices where the milk is the farthest away

fixture away from the front door. All of the chillers tend to be on the periphery because that's where easier to supply power. I mean, there are a bunch of different decisions that were made in the grocery industry in the 1930s, which is 90 years ago, which don't make complete sense today. Including this decision to favor open multi-decks over closed refrigerators.

which was made based on the very 1930s idea that supermarket shoppers were primarily homemakers with kids. If you think about somebody who's got a kid with them, is pushing a cart, you know, that they have one hand. And if somebody has to physically open and then physically pick, that's more effort than if they just have to pick. So it's all about ease of use, right?

And that's going to suddenly influence the behavior to maybe pick up more stuff. That's correct. It's funny. This may be the only large-scale design choice that I can think of that was made specifically with women in mind. And it was done to get them to spend more money. Paco said from top to bottom, the American supermarket is overdue for a makeover. And if we look at other countries for inspiration, we'll find designs that yield a whole host of different savings, including energy.

I can talk about grocery in other parts of the world where rather than going with a 90 degree angle, they deal with a 45 degree angle.

And what that means is that while I'm losing 20% of my shelf space, everything is much more visual from the standpoint of the customer. They see more things and are interacting with more things. Oh, if it's at a 45 degree angle, they can see more of the aisle. That's right. Correct. Paco also told me that in some Latin American countries, there are supermarkets that get their shelves restocked.

Via forklift. So rather than sending somebody out to put things back on the shelf from a cart, they come out with a forklift truck. They pick up the shelf to take it back to the back room. There's a team that restocks it. And then the forklift truck takes it back out on the floor and puts it back in its place. And the cost savings there in terms of labor is about 20 percent.

Is anybody here in the U.S. doing anything like that? Not yet, but maybe soon. I was so impressed by Paco and the way he connected psychology with business to produce real-world results. I asked him, like, hey, do you have any advice for a budding podcast tycoon like me? And Paco was like, nope, you're doing great. And then he signed out of our Zoom just as quickly as he'd appeared. And at this point, I thought it was time to catch up with Dylan. So I'm curious how you feel about all this.

Definitely not good. It was hard to blame Dylan. Essentially what we'd done was managed to confirm a fear he had while being unable to even talk to the people who could do anything about it. I'm learning very quickly making this show that the act of solving problems can create problems of its own. A month ago, I didn't notice that grocery store fridges didn't have doors on them at all. And now, not only has Dylan found his worst fears are true, I feel complicit in polluting the world like two to three times a week. But

You know, I also like milk and cucumbers and strawberries, so I can't just not use grocery store coolers. I suppose if there's any silver lining at all, at least I helped prove Dylan was right. That this is something to be concerned about. I guess the knowledge, like, you know, I'm not insane in thinking that, like, wow, this seems really wasteful. It is. It is really wasteful, it sounds like. And now there's going to be a podcast that many thousands of people will listen to, and they'll be like, that Dylan...

He was so right. Vindicated. Now my fiance can't question it. Oh, was she questioning it? No, but I don't think she was. She was like, whatever. There's other things to worry about in this world. I mean, sure there are, but you can go back to if, if there's any consolation prize in this world, it is being able to tell your significant other. I was right. This is true. This is always true.

If you count Dylan, me, Amor, and Emma, that makes four of us regular grocery shoppers that are now keenly aware of this one big way we're destroying the planet. That's not exactly enough to start a groundswell of social change, but if you heard this and you too are feeling like crap about buying hummus or whatever, I'll put the contact info for the five big grocery conglomerates in the show notes. ♪

It's seriously so good.

Thanks so much for listening.

Like, ever.

And it continues to be an all-time favorite episode. So check that out. And also check out the Roman Mars Mazda virus episode. It was so much fun to have that crossover with Reply All. We'll have links to those in the show notes too. This was our holiday off week, but we will be back with a new episode next week, kicking off the new year with more mini stories. See you then.

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