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Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs
Journal written by anaesthetica (596507) and posted by
kdawson
on Wed Jan 03, 2007 12:12 AM
from the bright-idea dept.
from the bright-idea dept.
While we all know from reading the internets that Wal-Mart is irredeemably evil, the world's largest retailer has committed to get compact fluorescent lightbulbs into 100 million homes this year. CFLs are found in only 6% of households today. These energy-saving bulbs use 75% less electricity than incandescents and produce far less greenhouse gas to manufacture and use. Wal-Mart seems determined to use its marketing prowess to do what hasn't successfully been done in the CFL's 25-year history: to convince consumers to pay more upfront for large savings over the product's lifetime.
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Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is that? Sure, the majority of people don't like Wal-Mart, but why do you feel the need to mention it in an article where Wal-Mart is doing something good?
As for the article it's mostly a "duh" thing. It's main points seem to be that Wal-Mart's trying to sell a lot of these bulbs, the people who make money off of incandescents don't like it, and then it goes into the history of the light bulb.
I'm glad Wal-Mart's doing this, too many people refuse to buy them, if Wal-Mart does what they always do (cheap) then their plan should work and power consumption should drop.
((Why do I see myself losing Karma here...?))
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
Might as well start the grand debate early on... (Score:5, Insightful)
RIAA is evil. They're suing their customers.
Microsoft is evil. They lock people into their products and make my job difficult with obscure licensing requirements and feature omissions.
SCO is evil. Sure, UNIX(r) was great and all, but we got over it years ago.
Wal-Mart? Come on. All they do is sell products that people want, for less money than the competition, and offer correspondingly little in the way of customer service. Just like Newegg, Amazon, or any of most of the other faceless online entities who are struggling to charge as little as possible in an attempt to get ahead. This might hurt the local specialty merchants, but then, so does Newegg limit the market of a brick-and-mortar specialty PC parts store, who stands no chance at all at matching the pricing, availability, or product diversity such a beastly online merchant.
That said, I'm an informed sort of fellow, and I don't really want to pay someone to hold my hand while I make a purchase, anyway. The decisive lack of knowledgeable sales representatives at Wal-Mart and Newegg is, to me, a clear advantage, because I don't have to pay extra for supposedly-clued people to stand around and bullshit me.
Right then. So you say that they only sell stuff made in China. But so do all of the other places where I can actually afford to shop.
And so, at the end of the day: I could either pay less for those cheap Chinese goods, or I could pay more. Obviously, I'd rather pay less. Just like I'd rather get a raise, than continue toiling away undercompensated. Just like I'd rather sit, than stand. And I'd rather lay down, than sit. And so on, and so forth.
So now, they're making a concerted effort to boost CFL lighting, so as to cause people to spend less money on electric lighting instead of more money on more money on electric lighting. A boon for everyone. Cool!
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
When we give a name to something, an entity as large as walmart for instance, that allows us to sum up the hundreds of thousands of people and millions of actions they take on behalf of walmart as one concept. But in reality, walmart is hundreds of thousands of people and millions of actions.
Add this to a blurry concept of good and evil, and you've got a real mess that can't be summarized easily and thus can't be easily comprehended by our brains.
The truth about walmart (and every other thing) is it is neither evil nor good. Some of the people are evil, some of the policies are evil, some are good, some of the people are good. I worked for walmart after college during a hard time in my industry ... I met all those people, good, bad, evil, and the majority just people trying to feed their families. Most aren't even capable of understanding the damage walmart as a hole does to the country (wage depression which leads to manufacturing outsourcing which leads to more wage depression)
Brighter CFLs would attract more buyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Brighter CFLs would attract more buyers (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two issues I have with CFLs though.
1) I have had problems with them interfering with IR remotes. The first time it happened to me, I thought I was mistaken about the TVs channel changing on it's own, as I wasn't really paying attention. The second time it happened, I freaked me out, because my wife was out of town, and the idea of my lights changing the channel never occured to me. I had to do a complete check of the house with a golf club to make sure there wasn't someone in the house. When the house checked out empty, I started looking for other possibilities. Over the next few weeks, I figured it out. Having the remotes stop working when the lights were on was the final determination. This may be better know, but it has kept me from using CFLs at all in any room that needs the use of an IR remote.
2) The county dumps in my area have declared the CFLs to be toxic waste. This makes it illegal to throw them in the garbage when they do die. The stores that sell the bulbs are not collecting them, so the only legal way to get rid of them is by driving them to the dump.
I don't know the actual toxicity of the CFLs, but I have to wonder what the actual environmental impact is when you account for the bulbs being toxic, and the extra trips to the dump to dispose of dead bulbs. Anyone with real data on this care to chime in?
Simple Economics Alright (Score:5, Insightful)
They will also have converted about 28% (nearly a third) of their yearly lightbulb sales to somthing that is 8 times as expensive.
Given that profit margins normally work on percentages, that should roughly octuple 28% of their profit margin on lightbulbs.
They should be making 2.96 times as much selling light bulbs, of course they want to push this.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I'm hoping LED-based lightbulbs become more common in the near future...
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Guess what? There is a delay.. maybe a second or so - and then on top of that it takes them about a minute to get up to full brightness. So the 100W equivalent CFL's I have put out (guesstimate) 20W of incandescent equivalent light. I keep my house at 70F. When the bulbs have been operating and are up to about (guesstimate) 100F, they turn on with about a 1/4 second delay. Who keeps their house at 100F?
This makes them inappropriate for stairwells, bathrooms, and any place with automatic light sensors.
Less AM Stress (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
There is a secnod bonus to CFL, they produce less heat. This is particularly important in Southern Climes where your cooling bill is considerably higher than your heating bill. Even those areas where it is frosty outside, electric heat is very inefficient so you are still better off.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Zero delay on modern bulbs. My only current complaint is that they don't play nice with dimmers. I use them everywhere else.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, 60 watt equivalent CFLs cost roughly $1.50 a piece (8 pack) at Costco. Much cheaper than Walmart. Nice, bright, instant on.
(A while back, in my dad's new garage, within 3 weeks - 6 of his fluorescent tube fixtures broke. It was a batch of bad ballasts in them. It would have been a bitch replacing just the ballasts - lots of cutting wires, tying the new one together, tearing the fixture apart and putting it back together again - in other words a PITA. We decided to go with regular bulb fixtures with CFLs because we would get the fluorescent cost benefits but the screw in bulb convenience.)
Anyway, the upfront cost is not worth complaining over - with regular use you got your money back within 3-5 months.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are they pushing an obsolete product? LEDs!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
LED not ready (Score:5, Informative)
High temp, not low temp, might be the answer. (Score:5, Interesting)
Typical CW fluorescents actually produce a slightly greenish light, not blue (and if you look at a spectrometer's output, you'll see a big spike around 550 nm, which is green), and have a correlated color temperature somewhere around 4000K. I say "somewhere around" because, since they are really producing a number of fairly distinct wavelenths rather than a continuous distribution, they don't have an exact black-body radiator equivalent. But the general consensus is that it's somewhere around 3400-4200K (depending on phosphor), with a greenish cast. It's this green cast that's the real killer, and makes CW fluorescent light so unflattering to most people's skin; the color temperature itself isn't the major issue.
If you want warmer (lower color temp) light, it is possible to buy "warm white" fluorescents. They have a correlated temperature of somewhere around 2950-3000K, or about the same as a 100W bulb. To most people, it looks a lot like an incandescent. They're still spectroscopically different (again, fluorescent produces peaks and valleys at various wavelengths, as will anything that's not actually heated to several thousand degrees), but they're designed so that the human eye perceives them as a warm 3000K source, rather than the usual green.
To be honest, I think "warm" lighting is vastly overrated. I agree that the CW fluorescents are obnoxious, but what I discovered is a far better option than trying to approximate the 3000K yellow glow of a bulb, was to jump up in color temperature, rather than trying to go down. Personally I've found that the high-temperature (5000K) "Daylight" fluorescents are the most pleasant. They don't have the green cast that the 3200K CW ones do, but they also don't have the false yellow tinge that the 'warm' ones do. They really are the closest thing to sunlight, if you get the right bulbs. (Some people also find them very handy for Seasonal Affective Disorder, in fact they're the key component of those pricey therapeutic lamps.)
Until I changed to 5000K lights, I never realized how yellow incandescents made everything appear. Walking from a room lit with the high-temp fluorescents to incandescent bulbs is like going from the outside into a cave; it's really striking. Rather than trying to produce crummy imitations of what are really a limitation of incandescent bulbs (their low color temperature), I think fluorescent light manufacturers should really be extolling their high-color-temperature, "full-spectrum" bulbs, because once you've lived with them, there's no going back. Unfortunately, it's going to take a while to rid people of the idea that 'high color temperature' means the cruddy, unflattering, green light they've grown accustomed to in office buildings and other institutional locations.
Three... (Score:5, Funny)
One to screw it in the socket, and two to lock the employees of the store that sold it in for the night [nytimes.com].
Re:They're still evil... (Score:5, Insightful)
Selling things for a profit isn't evil.
If you want to complain about Walmart, complain about their shitty service, or how their employees are morons, or the over all low quality of the products they sell, or how they treat their employees like dirt. There's no shortage of reasons why Walmart could be considered "evil", but selling things for a profit isn't one of them.
Everytime you get a paycheck that isn't negative, you've sold your labor for a profit. Get over it.
you've got this all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
It's that compact fluorescent bulbs are now irredeemably evil.
Re:Plop (Score:5, Insightful)
External Ambience lighting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank you Wal-Mart (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically
No, they're doing it to make money, gobs and gobs of it.