Fridge doors in Rootes: Vouch for a climate conscious campus!

The Problem

We are currently living through a climate change crisis and should be looking for ways we can become more efficient with our energy and resources. For example, the UK government is set to ban plastic straws and plastic cotton buds in 2020, as a way of combating plastic usage and the effect it has on our oceans. We have made extraordinary steps in changing our behaviours for the sake of our planet, but what else can be done? We believe that the next step is tackling big businesses, by calling them out and advising on how they can contribute to becoming ‘greener’. In our project, we wanted to raise awareness on the amount of wasted energy in those supermarkets which use open-door fridges. This issue had previously become a viral sensation after Gem Golding had posted on Facebook her concerns about the problem. Having around 15 thousand shares on her post, the petition Gem Golding had created reached 49,272 signatures, but was ceased in November 2019. In our project, we wanted to re-attend this issue by starting small and focus on our campus food retailer ‘Rootes Grocery’.  We believe that this was an important place to start as we wanted Warwick to be the first university to show initiative and show that they are willing to make investments for the sake of our environment, with the hope that other universities may follow, and then have made such an impact that food supermarket stores may follow. Our aim was to raise student awareness on this issue, showing Rootes that this is a change that the campus wanted. Besides, we also wanted to encourage students to change their behaviour related to sustainability and exercise their influence on corporate actors in addition to individual actions (e.g. saving electricity at home) which are more widely practiced.

Why is the problem important?

Although food retail stores claim that the reasoning for having an open-door fridge system is to reduce disruption of sales (Cool Products), however research conducted by Lindenberg et al (2008) found the opposite effect, where the temperature of certain aisles may be unpleasant to some shoppers, thus affecting their experience and perhaps sales. Therefore, it may be that this wasted energy is all for nothing, and it is time to take action.  

This problem is important as a simple addition of doors could help the environment and reduce the energy bill cost to the supermarket.

The target audience

The target audience of our project was Students. We decided to centre it around them for multiple reasons. Firstly, our project pertains to the environment. Studies such as McDougle, Greenspan & Harding (2011) and Simons, Slob, Holswilder & Tukker (2001) have shown that both Millennials and Generation Z care considerably more about the environment than their elders. As our initiative is focused around limiting the environmental impact of these open fridges, this passion for environmental protection should be engaged. Furthermore, the use of Google Form rather than paper signatures is highly suited to students. An electronic form allows us to collect signatures and build momentum behind the campaign  through shares and traffic on social media. In fact, students not at all related to us shared the petition 6 times on Facebook, broadening our reach to hundreds of students on campus. Finally, and most obviously, our project is tailored for them because Rootes is our campus supermarket. Rootes is one of the most frequented sites on campus, and an Instagram poll we have created revealed (N=52) 100% of Student participants had visited Rootes at least once, 94% had been over 10 times, and an even further 81% had attended over 30 times. Such a high frequency over such a large amount of people shows just how popular Rootes is and why it is incredibly fertile ground for change. 

The Intervention

  

Following a conversation with David Chapman, who is working for the Estates Team of the Warwick and is responsible for managing “anything and everything to do with sustainability”, we got to know that the Estates Team previously had an initiative to convince Rootes Grocery about putting doors on their fridges. They found that Rootes is reluctant to do so as they believe their consumers would be discouraged from purchasing if they would have to open doors to take the chilled/frozen products out. This was an opportunity for us to nudge behaviour change in two ways. Firstly, our aim was to change the behaviour of the managerial team of Rootes regarding energy-planning and nudge them to prioritise sustainability over customer-comfort. Besides –and we were more successful in this aspect– we wanted to nudge students to adopt a more active behaviour regarding sustainability by not only doing what they can individually but also exercising their influence as consumers to contribute to a larger scale change.

We sent the following email out to grocerystore@warwick.ac.uk.

“Dear Rootes Team,

We are contacting you about a potential solution for further reducing the environmental impacts of buildings on campus and your costs of running Rootes Grocery Store at the same time. We propose the introduction of doors on the fridges used in Rootes.

Keeping a household fridge door open whilst someone decides what to eat can add up to around 7% of the appliance’s total energy usage, leading to a possible wastage per year of 50-120 kilowatt hour (kWh). To illustrate this energy usage, 50kWh can power a dishwasher 20 times. This is just the impact a household fridge has on energy bills. According to a 2019 study, retrofitting doors to a typical open fronted display cabinet used in supermarkets can reduce the energy consumption of the appliance to 51.5% of that used by the open cabinet.

The UK Government already recognised the issue of energy waste due to the usage of open-door fridges and has started implementing measures to make large scale changes in supermarkets. The initiative to ban open door fridges has been paused during these politically hectic times. As part of our initiative we aim to re-attend the idea and encourage supermarkets to stop using open door fridges, starting from a small scale change, on campus, through raising student awareness of the issue.

As Rootes Grocery Store is being run by Warwick Retail  and contributes to the energy usage of campus buildings, it is an actor that is responsible for the success -or lack thereof- of the implementation of the University’s Environmental Policy. The University has declared a Climate Emergency and pledged to “make a substantial reduction in how much energy is used in buildings, new and old”. Rootes could make a substantial contribution to the realisation of this goal.

A potential argument for keeping the open fridges is that they might encourage customers to purchase more than their counterparts with doors. Here is where we can help, by raising awareness of the environmental issue caused by open fridges amongst students and encouraging them to stand by the ones with doors. We will start a petition to showcase that students -your main customers- are willing to put in the extra effort of opening a door and would like to see a reduction in energy waste.

Please let us know whether you are willing to commit to the environmental cause, reduce your costs and potentially gain more popularity amongst environmentally conscious customers this way.”

We also prepared a petition as mentioned in the email, which can be accessed here. We reached 93 signatures. 

To raise awareness of the cause and the petition, we shared it on Facebook, convinced sustainability-related societies (e.g. WIDS, on the screenshot) and friends to share it.

We also created stickers (the design on the right) ca. 45 of which we have put on fridges in common rooms (e.g. Liberal Arts and Global Sustainable Development, Politics and International Studies, Chaplaincy kitchen, and others) and campus accommodations.

The psychological and persuasion techniques used

1) Mere exposure

We were targeting the community of campus, which is quite easily locatable physically as well as in a virtual social media space they inhabit (as in: they follow various societies on facebook).

We wanted to capitalise on this and make sure that they are exposed to the project both on- and offline by promoting the petition on social media, through societies as well as in a paper format in common rooms and fresher accommodations. The mere exposure effect suggests that the more a person is exposed to something, the more familiar they will be with it and therefore the more they will favour it (Zajonc, 1968). This meant that by viewing our petition on social media, and potentially coming across it on campus, students would have taken a liking to our petition after seeing it multiple times and been more curious about it, more than they would have if they had not heard of it more than once. A study which suggested that familiarity with exposure could be linked with attraction is an experiment conducted by Peskin and Newell (2004) where 24 faces were displayed six times to participants, along with 16 faces only being shown once, proved that they rated the faces they were exposed to most higher, because it was more familiar to them. As our stickers were placed on kitchens and display boards on campus, the student had come across it more than once, meaning according to this theory, they would have shown much greater interest after multiple exposures. This idea would have further been reinforced if they also came across it on the social media posts we put up.

2) Evoking group identity

Our target audience were likely to have been involved in many different social groups. By placing our stickers in places where they socialise as students (accommodations and common rooms) and therefore are exposed to it around other students, the stickers became part of the exclusive space of an in-group (course, flat and the wider community of Warwick students). This is a circumstance that can make the students more inclined to take an interest in our stickers as it is a matter which concerns them with their student identity (their in-group). As identified by Tajfel (1970) in a “Minimal Groups” study where the participants had no loyalty to the group they were assigned to, and despite this still chose to maximise the difference between their rewards and the out-groups rewards, people do value the group they associate themselves with, as thats where they derive their self concept (Tajfel, 1981). By using language such as “our campus store” and “vouch for a climate conscious campus” we aimed to evoke a sense of belonging to an in-group of Warwick students and to offer an opportunity straightaway to express commitment to its suggested values (climate consciousness) by signing the petition. We used the technique of evoking a sense of belonging to an in-group not only in a physical space but also in virtual spaces: when certain societies shared the petition on their facebook sites, it is a sign for their members that they support the cause and therefore supporting it is an expression of belonging. This mechanism that we capitalised on can also be explained by Cialdini's (2014) fourth principle of liking/familiarity. Cialdini argues that people tend to like and believe does similar to them more than others. When students choose to be part of societies they chose based on liking them, based on having similar interests or based on the future interests/characteristics they wish to develop. Therefore, these societies are likable and familiar to their members, who are likely to believe that what the society shares on their social media platforms is important. We even built on this technique in our email to Rootes as we highlighted that “Rootes Grocery Store is being run by Warwick Retail [...] [and] is responsible for the success -or lack thereof- of the implementation of the University’s Environmental Policy.” we reminded them that as part of the Warwick enterprise environmental consciousness should be a priority for them if they want to maintain their position in the in-group.

3) Writing techniques

Rhetorical questions- One of the techniques we used on our stickers was a rhetorical question where a question is asked to a reader in order to make a dramatic effect rather than expecting an answer. By asking the readers “You open your fridge’s door at homme. Could you do that in Rootes too?”, we make a clear point suggesting that the readers should think about the effects of their actions. Furthermore, by using the word “You” in the text, we help a person identify what they are reading with themselves and take the text more personally as it is directed to them. By doing this it makes the reader feel powerful and make them realise that they can do something about this problem and potentially prevent it. The effectiveness of this technique has been supported by previous studies which suggest that rhetorical questions affect the direction of message processing when it comes to making a point (Ahluwalia & Burnkrant, 2004).

Emotive language- This technique helps gain an emotional response from the reader. By suggesting “putting doors on our campus store’s fridges would reduce energy waste substantially”, we make it clear that there is a problem that is affecting everyone, which makes the audience think. Then suggesting a solution for it makes them more likely to be concerned about this issue as they can easily take action by signing the petition and contribute to solving this problem. An association was found between persuasion and emotion state with regards to memory, further suggesting that the more a text gains an emotional response from an individual, the higher their persuasion rates would be as they will be more likely to remember it due to its effectiveness (Rocklage, Rucker, & Nordgren, 2018). Further studies also suggest that emotive language plays an important role in decision making (Macagno & Walton, 2010).

4) Closing the attitude-behaviour gap

Essentially, what we were aiming to show to both Rootes and the students themselves is that there are students on this campus who do care about the environment more than the comfort of not having to open a fridge door and are ready to act accordingly. We needed to build on the positive attitude of some students towards sustainability and help them turn it into action; not just the action of opening a fridge door once, but the action of setting the goal of not stopping to purchase from Rootes due to the discomfort of extra effort that would be brought about by the fridge doors in the long term either. As Juvan and Dolnicar (2014) discussed, there is a measurable gap between people’s attitude towards sustainability and their behaviour when it comes to tourism. Based on 25 qualitative interviews with environmental activists, they have found that although they were aware of the negative environmental consequences of their behaviour ­­–travelling– they found excuses to avoid cognitive dissonance (a discomfort caused by inconsistency of beliefs and behaviour) by attributing their behaviour to external factors, e.g. saying that they would not make a big difference anyway, if they would not travel as other industries are worse. In case of students who have a positive attitude towards sustainability and especially those who do something for the environment individually already (e.g. save energy at home) it can be easy and reasonable to externalise the environmental impact of companies, although some of them are maintained by their purchases, therefore depend on them as customers. This dependence is even more obvious when it comes to Rootes, as their main customers are Warwick’s students. In this case not a particular behaviour, but the lack of a particular behaviour –exercising one’s influence as a consumer on a company to achieve larger scale sustainable impact– is what can cause cognitive dissonance, once it is made salient. We wanted to make this gap salient and trigger cognitive dissonance, but also wanted to make the gap easily bridgeable by posing the question “[You open this fridge door.] Could you do that in Rootes too?” followed by “vouch for a climate conscious campus” on the stickers. We are emphasising that it is to some extant the students’ as customers’ responsibility to ensure that the campus is climate conscious, which can actually easily be done, by opening fridge doors in Rootes, and, of course, by signing the petition.

Successful?

In the sense that we convinced 93 students to turn their positive attitude towards sustainability into the action of using their influence to push for a larger scale sustainable impact than what they could achieve alone, yes. Unfortunately, Rootes did not respond to any of our emails or personal inquiries, which leads us to the last section. 

Potential further uses of this study

Potential broadening or expansion of this movement could be taken in two distinct directions. One such direction could be to campaign outside the grocery store itself. When we contacted the rootes customer service email, we were ignored on three separate occasions. Furthermore, we gained the email of the general manager and even he did not reply. To counteract this, we could in future create some sort of physical marketing campaign- such as having a spokesperson flyering outside of rootes. Our student perception and outreach was quite strong, but in order to have gained attention from those that could really cause a significant change, we could have made a more public spectacle showcasing our campaign. This however does have issues; in that we could face disciplinary action from either the SU or the company itself. As the SU does not permit these sorts of protests in their public spaces, such as the piazza or outside the SU offices, this could have had a significant effect on our academics, and this could be a risk too great to bear.

Another less controversial route of expansion could be either; to more outlets on campus or to surrounding eateries such as Subway, Tesco, Greggs or Aldi. A number of sites on campus such as the Humanities Café, Arts Centre Café, Library Café and Pret a Manger all have open door fridges. If we convinced one of these sites to switch, that could convince others such as Rootes to convert. If 3 out of 6 outlets for example switched technologies, then we could release another online form with exactly the same details and evidence but measure whether people would be more likely to attend the outlets that have changed technology, now knowing this information, over the more environmentally damaging ones. This would then allow us to quantify future behaviour change and present much more damning figures to Rootes, rather than just a petition.

References:

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Aparcio, S. (2014, February 18). Shut the Fridge Door – You’re Wasting Electricity. Retrieved from: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/a19095/refrigerator-door-wastes-energy/

Ban energy-wasting open fridges and freezers in all retail outlets. Retrieved from: https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/261092

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