Carrotmob: Green shopping by the bunch

March 4, 8:50 AMCharleston Green Living ExaminerPatti Romano

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Photo credit Megan Prusynski

During the first week of March 2009, all locally owned Charleston, SC businesses will be invited to make a bid to Carrotmob to green their stores.

What in the world is a Carrotmob?

“Carrotmob is the latest innovation in green consumer activism. It was created by Brent Schulkin, a 27-year-old Stanford grad, who was frustrated by the traditional methods of activism: protests, rallies, boycotts, emails, letters to the editors, and most of all silly chants.” Schulkin desperately wanted to find a way to solve the climate crisis. “Who else besides the government,” he asked, “is powerful enough to save the environment?” The answer he came up with: business! Schulkin discovered that most business owners were eager to go green, but lacked the funding to make lighting, refrigeration, and insulation changes (just to name a few) even if it would save energy and money in the long run.

Carrotmob was born! Schulkin first tested his project on two dozen liquor stores in his San Francisco Mission District neighborhood. He asked each store owner to submit a bid specifying the percent of a one day sale they were willing to spend making environmentally friendly and energy efficient changes. The store with the highest bid (22%) won. The winner: K & D Liquors.

Next, experts inspected the winning store to offer suggestions for energy improvements.

Then Carrotmob went to work! Brent Schulkin and Carrotmob pulled in a crowd (a bunch!) using the Carrotmob blog, online videos, Facebook, MySpace, word of mouth, and paper flyers to patronize  K & D Liquors on an agreed upon day. To Schulkin's delight, lines of shoppers wrapped around the corner at K & D  that day, and income soared. Sales for K & D Liquors exceeded $9000 (the normal weekend average was $1500-$2000). The K & D owners, as agreed, enthusiastically allocated 22% towards redoing their lighting and purchasing new gaskets for their refrigerators. Everyone was a winner that day!

The store won because they reaped the profits of a successful sale day and earned the money to make their store more environmentally friendly. The shoppers won because they used their collective consumer power to turn yet one more local business green. The community won because the town’s carbon emissions were reduced. And planet Earth won because there is a steadily growing number of innovative community activists like Carrotmob willing to do their part to help local businesses improve the environment. 

Join the Carrotmob in Charleston, SC on April 11, 2009. The sponsors, Green Drinks Charleston, Carolina's Eco-Unit, and Digitel look forward to hearing from you soon. carrotmobcharleston.blogspot.com

To see how Carrotmob offers a big juicy carrot to businesses for turning green, click the video link below.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

What do you think of Carrotmob? Would you be part of the bunch?