We live in the small seaside town of Skegness, and since an operation on my lower back (fused my spine after years of pain) I’ve been working on improving my fitness through walking around Skegness.

Currently built up to around a mile or so walk a day, can finally get to the beach and back, which is much better than just walking around the block.

Since my back (whole body) tends to hurt less late evening/night I’ve found we are tending to go for my daily walk at night in the dark sometimes.

Businesses Wasting Energy

Skegness is a typical small town, lots of small shops with a splattering of large shops like Tescos and Morrisons. Over the last few months as a family (Mum, Dad (me) and two youngest sons aged 15 and 12 years) we’ve become increasingly irritated (especially our 12 year old son) at the number of lights left on in shops and businesses within Skegness that really don’t need the lights on at night.

A quick example which is directly outside where we live is Morrisons. Morrisons closes at 8pm at night and the car park is pretty much deserted by 10pm strongly suggesting no one is working late at night. Despite this every single night Skegness Morrisons is lit up like a Christmas tree, I don’t think they ever turn the lights off (lights on 24hrs a day)!

Morrisons Supermarket Wasting Energy

This is a supermarket set back from the main road, so there is no passing trade that might happen to glance in a shop window and think, “ooh, 2 for 1 offer, I’ll buy some beans tomorrow”. So other than maybe security (which we feel is a false argument: will make a separate post on this) there’s no good reason for leaving the lights on and wasting so much energy. Multiply this by all the Morrisons supermarket stores, according to their website over 350 stores and that’s a LOT of wasted energy just on lights at night! Morrisons store lights on at night (10pm to 6am) energy usage alone has to be equivalent to the the cost of lighting a small village!

Morrisons Supermarket Waste

Complete waste of energy which we as consumers are paying for in higher food bills.

Businesses Please Stop Wasting Energy

About the only valid argument a business could have for leaving lights on through the entire night is security, but I think that’s a poor argument.

So we’ve been discussing what we can do to persuade businesses/shops to turn lights off at night.

Hence this article, feel free to comment below with your ideas and thoughts.

David (AKA Dad)