Retail
Commit to improving your Indoor Environmental Quality for happy customers.
Give the confidence shoppers want and increased productivity employers need through observing environmental air quality effectively. Small shops, big box stores and malls, wherever you shop, good IEQ with healthier air means an improvement to employee’s health and well-being and a better customer experience overall.
The need for environmental quality monitoring within malls relates to the overall consumer experience.
Shopping centers are the core of social gatherings where people go to meet with family, friends, or colleagues. Research has shown that mall traffic is back up as stores continue to open at full capacity. Air pollution is one of the biggest issues to affect everyone on a daily basis, it is proven that building managers need to continue to monitor IAQ to be able to provide a healthy shopping experience for consumers and employees. Additionally, to improve the overall IEQ it is important to go beyond ventilation and air quality monitoring thermal comfort, lightning, sound, ergonomics, and water.
Maintaining healthy IEQ is reliant on many different aspects:
- Temperature, airflow, ventilation, and source contaminants
- Perfumes, air fresheners, and other smells such as food courts
- Lightning control
- Ergonomic furniture for staff
- Acoustic design
The consumer and more so the employees are the target to whatever air is accessible at the time. Customers and employees who suffer from fragrance sensitivities poor indoor air quality can make them nauseous. While offering a fragrance-free shopping experience is far from realistic, monitoring your buildings IAQ is certainly a step in the right direction to detecting clean air.
Identifying the sources of poor IAQ can be done through continuous monitoring devices and understanding the building’s airflow patterns. Locating where the air enters the building and observing the air quality throughout can help managers locate the problems where contaminants may be entering their stores and common areas.
Retail establishments often feature open doors, or doors that are being opened frequently due to occupants entering and exiting the building – these are focus areas in which outdoor contaminants permeate throughout the building. Air quality within malls and retail shopping center’s is affected from outside pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2) from car exhaust due to high volume parking lots and cars moving at a slower speed.
Temperature and humidity levels within food courts, restaurants, dry clothing services, and home good stores (with many fragrance offerings) habitually cause higher CO2, total volatile organic compound (tVOC), and particulate matter (PM) levels due to many different pollutants in the air. Correlating to the levels of PM indoors, the frequency of catching a common cold of the retail store employees is statistically high, this alone is a great indicator that monitoring your building’s IEQ is important to the health and well-being of personnel and consumers.