Hyperfixed: Dylan’s Supermarket Cold Case

ROMAN MARS: 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 and 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. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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.

ALEX GOLDMAN: As a person who is close to the grocery store, do you find yourself going like– 

DYLAN: Oh, every day. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: Really? You’re there every day?

DYLAN: I pop over there. You know, this morning I needed milk. Boom. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: This is Dylan. He lives across the street from a Safeway. And as you heard, he goes there every day. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: What are you often getting at the store?

DYLAN: Man, definitely milk and cereal… Bagels. All the breakfast food to eat every meal of the day. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: What kind of cereal do you rock with? 

DYLAN: Today it was Cap’n Crunch, but normally it’s, like, bran flakes. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 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. 

DYLAN: So, 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. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 

DYLAN: Additionally, like, this store has a heating system, right? So, it’s cooling the fridge air but then it’s heating the store air and it seems like a big waste.

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 

DYLAN: So, definitely a big concern of mine is just, like, the climate environment. But I don’t always know the specific science behind, you know, like, why does a store have this refrigeration unit that does not seem very effective?

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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? 

ALEX GOLDMAN: Have you taken any steps to, like, figure out why they are designed this way?

DYLAN: Zero steps taken. I just reached out to you. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: I feel like–even though I’ve never, never spoken it aloud–it’s 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.

ALEX GOLDMAN: After my call with Dylan, I drove to my local Stop & 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. 

DAN PHILLIPS: 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 process. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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.”

DAN PHILLIPS: 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. And that is called an “open air multideck.” 

ALEX GOLDMAN: If you didn’t catch that, Dan says these refrigerated shelves are called “open air multidecks.” “Open” because they’re exposed to the elements, in this case, the cool air of the supermarket environment. And “multideck” 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.

DAN PHILLIPS: 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 gonna get and you can grab it out. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 

DAN PHILLIPS: 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 are there. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 

DAN PHILLIPS: 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 standing 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 multidecks 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 in this store and not go down the street. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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 exactly how much energy these multidex are using.

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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.

SCIENCE DANIEL: Well, I do prefer Daniel to Dan, but I’m happy for you to call me Science Daniel. Or you can call me whatever you like. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: Science Daniel! Perfect.

ALEX GOLDMAN: This is Science Daniel, AKA 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. 

SCIENCE DANIEL: 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. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: The paper I sent Science Daniel was from 2015. It’s titled The Energy Efficiency Paradox: A Case Study of Supermarket Refrigeration System Investment Decisions. All I wanted to know was, okay, what gives? These open multidecks are in every store. Can they really be as wasteful as Dylan imagines they are?

SCIENCE DANIEL: The fridges are using a huge amount of energy. It’s more than 50% of the total cost of the energy of the supermarket. 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. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: So, yeah, these things are expending a ton of energy. But he also told me the design of the open multideck is not the same. As when my kids leave the fridge door open at home, it is designed to be more efficient than that.

SCIENCE DANIEL: 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 with all the fancy techniques, et cetera, 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%.

So, it’s huge. I read one paper that suggested that the whole country would save, like, 1% or 2% of our energy costs for the whole country. I can’t stress that enough just by putting doors on the fridges. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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… 

SCIENCE DANIEL: The fact that you want to be able to reach 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% of our energy here in the U.S.–then, yeah, the more power you draw, the more cold they burn, and your yogurt pops are warming the whole planet.

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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 multidecks 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. 

SCIENCE DANIEL: 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. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: Okay. 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.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: We’re back with more from Alex Goldman and Hyperfixed. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: So, before the break, I found out just how wasteful these open multideck 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. 

[HAM HORN]

ALEX GOLDMAN: Albertsons doesn’t list contact information for any of their department heads. So, I decided to call Albertsons main office.

ALBERTSONS OPERATOR: Thank you for calling Albertsons Companies in Boise, Idaho. Please choose from the following menu options. For current or prospective suppliers, press five…

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 

ALBERTSONS OPERATOR: If you are calling about your grocery delivery or pickup, please press eight…

ALEX GOLDMAN: They directed me to their head of marketing.

ALBERTSONS HEAD OF MARKETING: But I can certainly ask one of our department to give you a call back and negotiate your issue. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: But she was on vacation. So, we reached out to Kroger, Costco, Whole Foods…

KROGER OPERATOR: Thank you for calling Kroger’s media relations department. Please leave a detailed message…

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: When you’re, like, 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.

PACO UNDERHILL: Well, I think part of what is very interesting is that the local grocery store manager is tired of me giving him advice.

ALEX GOLDMAN: [LAUGHS]

ALEX GOLDMAN: Paco runs a consulting firm called Envirosell 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.

PACO UNDERHILL: Part of what made us very popular is that we could come back with very immediate suggestions. “Here are ten things that you could do tomorrow, and you can immediately see what the difference is.”

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 

PACO UNDERHILL: Well, part of what you need to realize here is that the basic design of a grocery store was done in the 1930s. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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 a hundred years. And we are so used to it now, no one has bothered to update it.

PACO UNDERHILL: The physical design of the store and choices, where the milk is the farthest fixture away from the front door, all of the chillers tend to be on the periphery because that’s where it is 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.

ALEX GOLDMAN: Including this decision to favor open multidecks over closed refrigerators, which was made based on the very 1930s idea that supermarket shoppers were primarily homemakers with kids. 

PACO UNDERHILL: If you think about somebody who’s got a kid with them and is pushing a cart, you know, 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.

ALEX GOLDMAN: So, it’s all about ease of use. And that’s going to suddenly influence the behavior to maybe pick up more stuff. 

PACO UNDERHILL: That’s correct. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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. 

PACO UNDERHILL: 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. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: Oh! If it’s at a 45 degree angle, they can see more of the aisle. 

PACO UNDERHILL: That’s right. Correct. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: Paco also told me that, in some Latin American countries, there are supermarkets that get their shelves restocked via forklift.

PACO UNDERHILL: So, rather than sending somebody out to, you know, 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%. Is anybody here in the U. S. doing anything like that? Not yet, but maybe soon.

ALEX GOLDMAN: I was so impressed by Paco and the way he connected psychology with business to produce real world results, I asked him, “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.

ALEX GOLDMAN: So, I’m curious how you feel about all this. 

DYLAN: Definitely not good. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: It was hard to blame Dylan. Essentially, what we’d done was manage 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. 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. 

DYLAN: 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. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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.”

DYLAN: Vindicated. Now my fiancée can’t question it. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: Oh, was she questioning it? 

DYLAN: No, but I don’t think she was– She was like, “Whatever. There’s other things to worry about in this world.” 

ALEX GOLDMAN: I mean, sure there are. But if there’s any consolation prize in this world, it is being able to tell your significant other, “I was right.”

DYLAN: This is true. This is always true. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: 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.

Hyperfixed was produced by Emma Courtland, Sari Soffer Sukenik, and Amor Yates. It was edited by Emma Courtland and Amor Yates. It was hosted by me, Alex Goldman. The music is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. It was engineered by Tony Williams. The episode was fact-checked by Sona Avakian. The bit with the ham horn where it was like, “Pew pew pew!”–I ripped that off, whole cloth, from Jamie Loftus. Please listen to her podcast, Sixteenth Minute. It’s seriously so good. 

From this point forward, we are going to have a new episode every other week and bonus episodes in the off weeks. You can get bonus episodes, join our Discord, and much more at hyperfixedpod.com/join. Also, the show can’t exist without problems to solve, so head on over to hyperfixedpod.com and submit your problems. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening!

ROMAN MARS: Subscribe to Hyperfixed wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes every other week and bonus episodes on the off weeks. You can learn more about the show and sign up to be a premium member at hyperfixedpod.Com. We’ll have a link in the show notes. I also highly recommend that you listen to Alex Goldman’s two previous appearances on 99PI. His story, Heyoon, was his first narrative audio documentary, 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.