The newest locations in your portfolio are the easiest ones to fix, and they are the ones nobody has been assigned to.
A new location opens. The general contractor closes the punch list, the mechanical contractor confirms the rooftop units are running, and the keys go to the store team. The thermostat is holding whatever schedule the installer entered during commissioning. That schedule was chosen to pass a startup test on an afternoon in March. It was not chosen to run a building through August, or through a Tuesday when the store is empty from two to four, or through a winter morning when the crew arrives ninety minutes before the doors open.
Nobody did anything wrong. Configuring a thermostat for the way a specific store actually operates is not the mechanical contractor's job, and it is not on the opening checklist. So the setting stays.
This is not a small number of buildings.
Ross Stores opened 47 locations in the second quarter and raised its 2026 plan to 115 openings, up from 110 in prior guidance. TJX told investors it plans to accelerate store openings to 4% annually starting next year, and raised its long-term store target by 500 locations.
Those are two companies. Run the same pattern across a portfolio of franchise groups, regional chains, and c-store operators, and the number of buildings that came online in the last eighteen months and have never had their setpoints reviewed is large.
None of those openings came with a proportional increase in facilities headcount. The team that managed 180 locations now manages 195, with the same number of people and the same number of hours.
Commercial electricity averaged 14.19 cents per kilowatt-hour in June 2026, against 13.54 cents in June 2025. That is a 4.8% increase year over year, and it lands on every hour the equipment runs.
A schedule that holds occupied setpoint two hours longer than the store is open does that seven days a week, in a building that is brand new and running perfectly. There is no fault code. There is no complaint. Nothing on any dashboard says the site is a problem, because by every measure of equipment health, it is not. It is just running on a setting that was never meant to be permanent.
That is what makes these sites different from a twenty-year-old store with a failing compressor. The old store announces itself. The new one does not.
Energy programs almost always start at the worst-performing sites, and there is a good reason for that. The worst sites generate complaints, work orders, and emergency calls. They have a number attached to them already. When a facilities director has to justify a project, the site with three truck rolls last quarter is the easy one to point at.
The new store has none of that. It has no history, no complaints, and no line item. It is invisible in exactly the way a well-behaved site is invisible.
But the new store is also the easiest building in the portfolio to change. There is no aging equipment to work around. There is no local workaround culture where the assistant manager has learned to override the schedule every morning because it never worked right. There is nobody defending the current settings, because nobody chose them.
The oldest sites need capital. The newest sites need an hour.
The fix is procedural, not technical, and it does not require a capital request.
Add a step to the store-opening process: before the site is considered closed out, someone reviews the thermostat schedule against how that specific store actually operates. Opening and closing times, the real ones, not the ones on the sign. Prep crew arrival. The daypart when the dining room is empty. Whether the building holds temperature overnight or has to be recovered in the morning.
That is a conversation between the facilities team and the store manager, and it takes about twenty minutes per site. It can be done with a spreadsheet and a phone call.
Two things make it worth formalizing rather than leaving to whoever remembers. First, it has to happen close to opening, while the store team still has attention for it and before the current settings become the way it has always been. Second, it has to be somebody's named responsibility, or it will lose every week to the emergency at the old store across town.
Pull a list of every location that opened in the last eighteen months. For each one, find out who last changed the thermostat schedule and when. If the answer is the installer, and the date is the commissioning date, you have found the cheapest work available to you.
Start there before you start at the bottom of the performance report.
At the fleet level, this is the problem GlacierGrid's Smart Setpoints and Adaptive Recovery is built for: recovering a group of sites to occupied setpoint without every building pulling at once and building one coincident demand peak. But the first move does not require software. It requires knowing which of your buildings have never been configured, and that is usually a question the reporting was never set up to answer.
Start a free 90-day pilot and find out what your newest locations are actually running.