Open to Change

-Store Equipment & Design, March 1996

Open to Change

Daylighting creates wide-open feeling and maze of options

By Terry Hennesy

Creating the ambiance of an open-air market is much more complex than "punching a hole in the ceiling," as one leading lighting researcher warns.

Control is a big factor: There are levels of light to consider-experts cite three layers of effective lighting-as well as the pitfall of excessive daylight, which can cause product degradation and actually drive customers away.

Then there are the cost factors. Measuring the installation payback can be difficult because the savings in electricity has to be measured against the increased heat load in the summer and heat loss in the winter.

And then, of course, there is the bottom line; determining whether the brighter, warmer daylight atmosphere results in more sales.

It's just plain tough to play Mother Nature. Yet, where it has been done effectively, customers, store personnel and lighting experts rave.

"It's a whole different way of looking at box retail," said Nancy Clanton, a lighting consultant with Clanton Engineering Inc., in Boulder, CO. "Daylighting brightens the ceiling and brings people into the store. Plus, if you can light the ceiling, you create a sense of volume."

Most supermarkets, she said, automatically install uniform lighting. "They don't really think about what they are lighting or the space they are lighting," said Clanton, who helped design the landmark Wal-Mart store in the City of Industry, CA, one of the stores considered a daylighting prototype.

In three of King Sooper Inc.'s 68 stores in the Colorado front range area, daylighting has created an open-market ambiance but at an undetermined cost.

"The effect is good and the customers like the environment we created," said Leonard Micek, King Sooper manager of engineering. "But we haven't had a chance to see if it has increased sales. The first two stores have been open a little over a year and the third opened in late 1995. We haven't tracked profit differences yet, but we will before we decide to do any more."

Many retailers are holding off, waiting for just such numbers to come in. The main store to watch is the City of Industry's Wal-Mart, which opened in January.

Just the statistics are impressive: 288 solar panels, 180 high-performance skylights-one-third of them on solar tracks to follow the sun, and sensors that automatically dim interior lights as the sun provides more light and power.

Wal-Mart hopes to benefit from the experiment in a number of ways. 'We want to show that Wal-Mart can operate a profitable business and at the same time be environmentally responsible," said Wal-Mart spokesman Les Copeland. "And what we are learning at this store is helping us to understand the technologies of the future for our other stores. And, finally, we hope this store serves as a test tube for other retailers as we approach the 21st century. We hope to set the pace for a lot of businesses."

Wal-Mart is confident there will be a return on its lighting investment. "We wouldn't have done it if we didn't think it would be a profitable store," said Copeland.

One part of the return is energy savings, which Southern California Edison will be measuring this year.

"We will be verifying the effects of daylighting in this store versus stores with similar demographics, such as age, percent of the population using the store, and other factors," said Greg Antler, a Southern California Edison architect and leading daylighting expert. "We are projecting a savings of about $75,000 a year on energy."

As David Noller, director of energy utilization for Ralphs Grocery Company in Compton, CA, has noted, "While the value of daylighting is clearly there, it is hard to measure the exact payback. Lighting is only 25 percent of total supermarket energy bill and there is the thermal load of the sunshine to consider."

The savings should be considerable, he said, because the light sensors begin shutting down the main lights as the sun provides the 100-candle minimum lighting requirement inside the store.

"As the sun goes down, we begin shutting down one row after another," he said. "For a healthy part of the day, there is no lighting on the sales floor. If I were to guess at our energy savings, I would calculate that it is many thousands of dollars a year."

Increased sales also are beginning to be measured.

Although the new Wal-Mart prototype had record million-dollar sales in the first week, according to a consultant working on the project, it's too early to tell how much of the sales was due to the added ambiance of the daylighting.

"We haven't done any studies yet linking sales directly to daylighting," said Copeland of the 130,936-sq.-ft. store.

However, there is widespread agreement among supermarket and lighting experts that if stores provide a warm, inviting atmosphere, customers will want to stay and shop longer-and buy more.

Ralphs has been installing daylighting for about eight years in about 60 of its 400 California stores.

"It's an attractive feature; daylighting really makes a store light up and the customers love it," Noller reported.

On the East Coast, Harris Teeter uses daylighting in 10 percent to 15 percent of its 140 stores.

"Where we have done it, and done it right, with windows on the north side of the building, it comes off pretty good," said Mark Fenton, Harris Teeter's in-house architect. "It creates the feeling of an open-air type of market."

Harris Teeter concentrates the daylighting on the produce department, Fenton said, although stores try to situate the deli and bakery departments near produce so that they benefit from daylighting as well.

One of the dangers of daylighting is accelerated product degradation.

Perry Kotick, senior lighting engineer for Columbus, OH-based Retail Planning Associates (RPA), discovered the dangers in a store designed for daylighting in Mexico City.

"We worked with a client in Mexico, using a mega-market concept, and they used a lot of skylighting to give it an open market feel," said Kotick, who designed the conventional lighting for the project.

But there were some negatives. "We found that unless you develop a costly daylighting program, it is so bright that you lose the ability to create drama with lighting. And, in Mexico, they did not cool the space so there was a lot of degradation of processed meats and produce. They thought our lights were greening the meat, but we found out it was the daylighting."

Despite the drawbacks, Kotick and others are still firm backers of daylighting-when it is designed correctly.

"Done properly," he said "You can get a very pleasing, natural environment: You can take supermarkets to another level using daylighting. It allows you to do a lot with signage and banners with higher ceilings and greater consistency in lighting. Stores can even use daylighting as double-edged sword, throwing light out of the skylights at night and creating a nice beacon effect."

Store Equipment & Design, March 1996