New Haven Independent

By Craig Fehrman

Over the last few years, Connecticut communities have regularly squabbled with Very Intimate Pleasures (VIP), a chain of “Mega romantic boutiques” that sells adult entertainment, sex toys, lingerie, and so on. In Berlin, it was a VIP billboard located too close to Bethany Covenant Church; in Manchester, it was the opening of a new location, this one the largest adult store on the East Coast.

Whatever your take on buildings and billboards, I think we can all agree on loathing one aspect of VIP’s growing empire—namely, the “VIP Truck,” a bulky, black contraption covered in the stores’ ads. There are plenty of reasons to look down on this neon blight. Maybe you find such a large vehicle patrolling New Haven’s narrow streets inconvenient. Maybe you worry about the added distraction for drivers. Maybe, like me, you live on the second floor.

But here’s a new reason to look down on the VIP truck: its hefty carbon imprint. This possibility struck me the other night when, walking down York Street, I spotted the postmodern panel van. Like most New Haveners, I’ve seen the truck so many times that it blends into the background, but this time it startled me—not as Advertisement, but as Vehicle. Ask me to block out breasts the size of manhole covers and I’ll cheerfully comply, but I can’t overlook a faint trail of exhaust.

I think my heightened sensitivity to all-things-environment stems from the current presidential campaign. In those fleeting moments when they’re not rejecting and denouncing, Barack Obama and John McCain have rightly stressed the importance of “greening” America. And “carbon imprint”—or carbon footprint, or ecological imprint, or whatever—has become a key term in this engagement.

Plenty of things contribute to your carbon imprint, from the kind of food you eat and how you prepare it to the length and temperature of your shower (perhaps a distracting example for this particular story). Even though most studies estimate that transportation contributes only 10 to 15 percent of your carbon imprint, it often garners the most attention. My reaction to the VIP truck is a perfect example of this imbalance.

Nevertheless, I decided to undertake a bit of investigative reporting. This meant driving to VIP’s Orange location and asking the tough questions. While I waited for Ralph, the store’s manager, some stray employees mentioned that one truck services all of VIP’s locations, and that the truck, despite its slim profile, “makes deliveries.” (Unfortunately, I couldn’t get more information on this topic. Does “deliveries” mean store-to-store deliveries, as in redistributing hot-selling items from the Deviant Housewives line? Does it mean customer deliveries, as in supplying emergency items for some kind of tantric takeout?)

About this time, Ralph ambled over and said it was “company policy not to comment on the truck.” And that was that.

So let’s try some napkin-style calculations, erring on the side of conservatism. Assume the VIP truck goes out three nights a week and drives from 8-12 p.m.; further, assume it maintains a cruising speed of around 20 miles per hour and thus travels 4,080 miles per year. (These numbers also assume the VIP driver—surely certified, unionized, insured, etc.—takes one week of paid vacation per year.)
With these raw data, it’s easy to calculate a carbon imprint. The Internet now offers more free “carbon imprint calculators” than free IQ tests. I chose the one at carboncounter.org, which requires annual mileage and the vehicle’s miles per gallon.

Since Ralph wouldn’t divulge even the truck’s make or model, I called Rod Harris, who sells similar vehicles at truckads.com. He said a truck like VIP’s would get approximately 15 MPG during city cruising, so I punched that number into carboncounter.org, along with my lowball estimate on the annual mileage. The VIP truck, it turns out, produces 2.39 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year—more than twice the amount produced by the average New Haven driver.

To be fair, VIP harms the environment in other ways: putting billboards on I-91 and I-95, heating and lighting 16,000 square feet of sin, and (disclosure alert) running paper ads in newspapers. But these seem more forgivable, if for no other reason than they’re more common. You expect similar expenditures from Bethany Covenant Church or Barack Obama. The VIP truck is an innovation, or at least an outlier, and it’s polluting more than just our minds.

So let me offer VIP a modest proposal. Web sites like carboncounter.org often include “carbon offset” programs, which work to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and thus “offset” your carbon imprint. Potential donors can even match the size of their gifts with the size of their imprints; that means the good folks at VIP could give just enough to balance out their flagship’s pollution.

As an added bonus, many carbon offset programs are tax-deductible in design and international in scope. I imagine VIP would love a venture that reduces dealings with local officials and local citizens, even if it reduces nothing else.