Shut that door!

It's time for retailers to close their front doors. Not only do open doors admit traffic noise and fumes; they also let out vast amounts of wasted energy. A new UK pressure group called Close The Door estimates the cost at hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and is gathering excellent media coverage and growing political support: there's a private member's bill due in Parliament at the end of this year.

In the US, the Long Island Power Authority estimated that retailers waste 20 to 25 percent of the energy they consume by allowing air-conditioned cool air to waft out onto the sidewalk - and in some areas the proportion of shops with their doors open as a matter of policy was a high as 65 percent. According to LIPA Chairman Richard M Kessel:

“Customers should ask the stores to close their doors. What good does it do to worry about such issues as air quality, global warming and high energy prices when one is scooting in an out of stores that waste 20 to 25 percent of the electricity they use? The message from customers should be: Be Cool – Keep it Closed.”

Now New York's Mayor Bloomberg has passed legislation banning shops from leaving their doors open while running their AC. But in the UK the practice remains common in summer and winter alike. A stroll down London's Oxford Street reveals that the vast majority of store doors are wide open, leaking energy and admitting noise and fumes. In my book I wrote this about the aural consequences:

I have stood in booth-like cell-phone outlets on Oxford Street wondering aghast how the people who work in there survive without therapy, and how any sensible business conversations take place at all. To add insult to injury, some of them are playing semi-audible music, presumably in the hope that this will make everything fine. It doesn’t.

I speculated that the noisy and smelly front few metres of many stores is effectively dead space, with much lower takings per metre than the more comfortable back part of the store, negating any benefits retailers claim from their open doors letting more people in; also, closed doors stop people from leaving just as much as they stop them from entering.

I would love to see a return to the old-fashioned system of revolving doors, which keep the noise out, the energy in and require no power to operate at all. An extra aural (and also environmental) benefit would be getting rid of those noisy and wasteful hot air blowers that many stores use instead of air curtains.

Shops with closed doors would be quieter, calmer and much more pleasant places to be, and I believe sales would increase - as long as the retailers also control their habit of playing mindless music, which surveys have shown upsets at least a third of their customers.

I welcome the new campaign and look forward to some sensible legislation on this in the UK very soon.

Technorati Tags: noise, shopping, retail sound, shops, environment, Close The Door

Conversation with the Planetwalker

Wonderful meeting with John Francis, the Planetwalker who spent 17 years in silence while he was walking across the US and Latin America. I met John originally at TED2008 and it was a pleasure to catch up in London, where he is on a short visit for the launch of his book. John is a gentle man who has achieved amazing things: during his long walk he took a degree and a PhD in land resorces and then taught at degree level, all without saying a word.

In the 22 years that John walked, and the 17 years that he refrained from speaking, he found a gentle yet potent wisdom about our way of living. His message is simple but challenging: saving the world starts and ends with respecting ourselves and the people immediately around us - for if we care about others, we will behave in ways that don't create bad consequences for them, or for the planet. John is now United Nations Goodwill Ambassador to the world's grassroots communities, and a leading figure in the global environmental movement. he's also an inspiration to us all, and I heartily recommend his book Planetwalker.

Naturally with my sound-based perspective, what fascinates me most about John's remarkable story is how he was transformed by his elective silence. Within 24 hours of deciding not to speak, he discovered that he had never truly listened. With no possibility of answering people, he found that instead of planning his next remark, or judging his degree of agreement or disagreement, he was simply listening. For most people, the silent part of conversation isn't really silent at all: their internal voice is judging, assessing, cross-indexing, selecting potential replies, or working out how to impress others or to win the contest that often underpins conversation.

In my book I write about the different qualities of listening that exist, and distinguish three dimensions: active-passive, empatheric-critical, and reductive-expansive. Active listening is designed to make the other feel heard, using techniques such as reflection and summarising; passive listening is non-judgmental, akin to the way we listen to music. Empathetic listening is designed to make the other feel emotionally understood; critical listening has conscious filters in place. Reductive listening is selective, discarding whatever's not on-target for the listener's goals; expansive listening is simply curious, open to whatever comes.

What I think John Francis discovered as he walked in silence and listened to the world is the richness of passive/empathetic/expansive listening, the polar opposite of the most common position in the Western world, which is active/critical/reductive. When speaking is taken out of the equation, all that remains is experiencing the words of others in the here and now. It's no coincidence that many spiritual masters and religious orders have adopted silence as a practice. (For more about silence as a whole see my previous blog on silence here). The difference with John is that he undertook the practice in the real world, not in a walled community where it was the norm. His experience sheds unique insight on the value of silence. I think all children should spend at least a week in silence as part of their education. What a different world we would inhabit if we all learned to listen in this way!