Dear store managers of the world:

[conuly]

If it is cold outside, you can expect that your customers will be wearing coats. Perhaps you can take this into account when setting the thermostat? I'm not suggesting that your employees have to shiver, but I can't help thinking that maybe they can learn to be just as comfortable in sweatshirts as they currently are in t-shirts. Just maybe. Perhaps you can ask all the other stores in the area what temperature they set theirs to and match it?

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Comments

[thewayne]

Normally that's not a problem here: Alamogordo, at the base of the mountain, is typically 10-20f warmer than up here at the top in Cloudcroft. On rare occasion Alamogordo is colder: Cloudcroft is 9,000' and Alamo is 4500ish'. And our shopping mall is not worth setting foot in: it was formerly anchored by JC Penney at one end and KMart at the other, the KMart closed last year and part of it re-opened as a Harbor Freight. The Hallmark store both here and in Las Cruces closed down, we also lost our Sears store, so the only reason that I have to go in to the mall is to drop of a few boxes of books.

The mall was bought out by a corp that apparently is good at revitalizing dead malls and bringing them back to 100% occupancy, and they did such at the mall in Gallup, NM. It'll be interesting to see if they can work similar magic here.

[mommy]

My father is one of the many U.S. gun owners who fail to safely store their guns. I find guns tucked into random places (under the couch, behind the Blu-Ray player, in the spice cupboard, on the floor next to the bed, etc.) every time I visit.

[stormkeeper_lovesall]

That's so true about stores! And my local library. I wish they'd figure the temperature out.

[archersangel]

another problem with the stores is that when it does warm up for a few days, or when spring really gets started, they fail to correct for this & the store is WAY too hot inside.

[conuly]

Cloudcroft is an awesome name.

[conuly]

Oh, dear.

[conuly]

Here, the librarians all claim the NYPL sets the thermostat using some method other than "Look at the weather forecast, determine a reasonable temp for the day". It'd surely make more sense to let the librarians set the thermostat for their own branches, but no, instead they just open the windows all winter.

[conuly]

YES.

[thewayne]

It's definitely apt.  I remember one trip up here before we married I left Phoenix and drove across the desert in the night, then the sun was just rising as I got in to the forest.  Very awesome sight.

[conuly]

Too cold in summer is still better than sweltering in summer.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Store managers often can't do anything about the temperature settings - usually these days the entire building will have a big heat pump, with day/night temps programmed in automatically, regardless of the weather outside. That's probably the reason why the staff in that store are wearing T-shirts instead of sweatshirts in mid-winter: they're too hot too.

Ack, the Very Scary Caterpillar! It reminds me of the even scarier one in that old story “The Cocoon” by John B. L. Goodwin.

[conuly]

In this case it's a stand-alone building. So.

[spikethemuffin]

Echoing "probably no control over this" with a side of: I used to work retail in a chi-chi neighborhood in the suburbs north of Chicago. Believe it or not, if we wore long-sleeved shirts under our shirts or cardigans over our shirts, our customers would complain that our "look" was not uniform--- even if we were hauling their 80-pound bags of dog food out to their cars for them in the howling Chicago January (it was a bit colder back then, and actually fairly uncomfortable to be going outside in wearing only a t-shirt). We were grateful for the heat, plus it was a pet store and some of the animals would have suffered. But I definitely feel you, that having been said! I think it must humanize store employees to be wearing variants on uniforms, and that makes people way more uncomfortable than heat or cold.

[conuly]

...I can't imagine caring, much less complaining, about whether or not staff was "uniform" so long as I could easily identify them. Same color shirt is good enough for me.

[spikethemuffin]

Right? Me too. That suburb made me tend to be a little bigoted with regards to rich, entitled white people--- at one point, I literally had someone complain to the manager because I had gone to another store during lunch, and I sought out an employee of that store to help her rather than use my lunch break to shop for her...

[conuly]

Complain to your manager or to the other store's manager?

[spikethemuffin]

My manager. To his credit, he didn't reprimand me an kind of laughed once she'd left.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Probably still has a heat pump with a computerized thermostat. Did you say anything about the temperature to the staff?

[conuly]

God no. I was too busy sweating!