Right off the bat, I need to excuse myself for not discussing sustainability in this post. No matter how many green products and solar installations a Wal-Mart may feature, it’s hardly the missing piece of the sustainability puzzle. But if you’re going to be an energy-hogging, supply-chain-domineering monster, you might as well power yourself with solar, is what I always say. Or at least, just said.
Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart’s wholesale self, is taking the recent big box store trend towards solar and moving it indoors. They’re going to begin selling solar arrays. Through a partnership with Borrego Solar (installers) and BP Solar (manufacturers), nine California stores will have a photovoltaics-panel display inside the store at which customers can learn about residential solar, and order a system themselves. Having known one too many appliance installation experiences through Home Depot gone awry, I have some misgivings about how this will actually work out, but the idea is pretty cool. And in fact, Home Depot has been doing the same thing, with somewhat less fanfare, for a couple of years now. The informational kiosks inside the stores will, if nothing else, raise more peoples’ awareness of home solar, and for many, it will be the only place they can think of to start asking questions and possibly get a human being to answer them. (Here I will not say anything further on the subject of actual in-store question-asking experiences…)
Through partnering with a manufacturer and an installer, Sam’s Club is looking to offer a savings of about $500 per customer, compared with the cost of a system purchased elsewhere. $500 is not a lot of money in the realm of $25,000 systems, but it’s still $500, and a great advertising tool, I’m sure. And to avoid wasting the real estate required by these in-store “Efficiency Centers”, customers will find more immediately affordable products clustered nearby: CFLs, water-saving toilets and showerheads, Energy Star appliances, and the like. It does intrigue me that going through the store could actually be cheaper than going directly to the installer: what’s in it for Sam’s Club? We can safely assume, I think, that they are not offering solar as a public service.
I’ll be curious to see if Sam’s Club’s decision to become a solar retailer influences how solar ends of being marketed and sold in this country. We buy everything else at strip malls, so why not solar? But the design and installation of a solar energy system for your home requires highly skilled contractors and can be a time-consuming process; when only a couple of installations come out of each center, I imagine this will be fine, but if it really takes off, it seems like either many folks won’t be able to get solar at all through this method–or will be put on a long waiting list–or they’ll get installations not as tailored to and considerate of their personalized needs as they should. Convenience and cost versus quality: it’s the choice big box customers have been making for years.
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