Hot shops are sweltering!

Retailers wanting to out-do each other in creating the most enticing Christmas shopping experiences are wasting huge amounts of energy, according to the business price comparison service Make It Cheaper.

Make It Cheaper’s research shows that the average internal shop temperature is 23.6_C, more than five degrees warmer than the ideal ambient shopping temperature of 18_C as recommended by the Chartered Institute for Building Services Engineers.

The hottest recorded in a survey of London’s Oxford Street, for example, was a sweltering 27.2_C in TopShop’s flagship 90,000sq ft store. Furthermore, only six shops out of more than 100 surveyed had their doors closed at a time when the outside temperature was close to freezing.

Jonathan Elliott, managing director of Make It Cheaper, commented: “Even in hard times, this is the stage of the year when retailers literally throw caution to the wind, no matter how Arctic it is, opening their doors - wide open in most cases - and crank up the heating. Throw extra lights into the equation and extended opening hours, and you have exceptionally heavy business electricity consumption for the entire Christmas season. No wonder high street retailers make up one the busiest industry sectors when it comes to switching business electricity and commercial gas contracts.”

Cutting down on unnecessary waste and getting on the right energy contracts go hand-in-hand for any business, whatever their sector. Switching business energy suppliers can reduce your bill by as much as 50% and taking energy efficiency measures can bring down your annual bill by a further 10%-30%.

For those in any doubt on how to go about it or just looking for an easy solution, Make It Cheaper offers a service which checks current contracts on the customer’s behalf, logs renewal dates and - during the notice window - will contact customers with the best available rates in the market.

More information: www.makeitcheaper.com