There's a Sam's Club a couple of hours east of where I live that recently installed windmills on the light posts in the parking lot. People have been talking about this online...a lot. It's the kind of thing people tell their neighbors about. ("Did you see those new lights at Sam's Club...?") And that's what makes it such a great idea.

Admittedly, part of the reason this works is due to where this particular Sam's Club is located. There's no shortage of wind blowing through that area. So, there's a chance that it won't scale out to every other Sam's Club in the country.

But I'm sure there were tons of marketers at Sam Club's headquarters doing something boring like analyzing demographics in an effort to figure out how best to spend tens of thousands of advertising dollars. Someone had the bright ideas to get some conversations started by putting windmill-powered lights in the parking lot. Which one seems less wasteful to you?

In other news, Don Quixote decided to start shopping at Costco.