Do you think you'll be okay as long as there's a convenience store around!?

Convenience stores have pushed convenience and efficiency to their limits and are a symbol of modern society. In just about 25 years, tens of thousands of them have sprung up and now bank teller functions and e-commerce functions have been added to payment of utility bills and sales of tickets so that they are our neighborhoods' necessities for daily life.


What about the electricity consumption of these ever brightly lit convenience stores?

We checked up on the electricity consumption of convenience stores, which await their customers with store interiors that are always brightly lit up. According to an actual measurement survey by Mr. Noriyuki Washizu in the magazine Enerugi Keizai (Energy Economics) published by the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan, the figures for electricity consumption for a store designated as K Store, a suburban type store in the Kanto area which is open twenty four hours a day and covers 140 square meters, is 484.2 kWh or 208 eu a day in summer or 442.0 kWh in winter (190 eu, an estimate based on summer figures). Of this about half was for refrigerator and freezer equipment and lighting was about 20 per cent.
The question is how to conserve energy and, according to Mr Washizu's paper, there are many technologies that could be introduced, such as the improvements in technology for night covers on refrigeration and freezer equipment, gas showcases, ice regenerator systems and using inverters on the lighting. The above K Store uses an energy saving system to sense the brightness of the outdoor light with sensors in the daytime and adjust their lights for a ten percent cut in use of electricity for lighting. Since the average energy consumption for a private home is around 15 eu, this energy consumption is somewhat more than ten times that. This is less than we might expect of a store that provides services so much needed by the community. Perhaps that is only natural since the convenience stores' system places such emphasis on efficiency and cutting out waste.


Convenience store chains give thought to the environment.

It is an industry that easily catches the public eye so they advertise their environmental activities. If you look at the companies' web sites you will see that they are making efforts. One has acquired the ISO14001 approval for environmental management, another has announced the environmental objective of cutting its electrical consumption per store by 4 percent compared with 1990, yet another has constructed an "ecoshop" which is an experimental store with an eye to the environment.
Considering that the convenience store is a symbol of modern society, it may be that their attitude of ridding themselves of waste and looking for efficiency will provide a clue to the solution of environmental problems in our daily lives.


by Shinji Yagi

Note:

As for consumption of energy by convenience stores, delivery trucks are more of a problem than the stores themselves. The main characteristic of a convenience store is that there are almost no reserve stocks of goods and instead they grasp how much they have left with a point of sale system and then trucks deliver goods many times a day. There was criticism that because of this transportation was affected by the too frequent delivery of goods. This is something to take note of, in the light of Tokyo Governor Ishihara's recent statement on cutting down on diesel trucks. According to one convenience store chain's web site, they have now cut down to nine truck deliveries a day per store as compared with 70 a day in the past.

Reference:

Noriyuki Washizu "Thoughts on an actual measurement survey of electricity consumption in the retail sector--on the possibility of saving electricity and equalizing loads in super markets and convenience stores." Enerugi Keizai (Energy Economics), August 1999 by the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.