With the fall season and Thanksgiving actually not that far away, my thoughts turn to holiday movies including those endless movies on the Hallmark Channel where the good looking guy and good looking girl are at odds at the start, but you know they will fall in love and end up married within the 80 minutes of actual movie time (padded out to two hours thanks to 40 minutes of commercials.)

One such flick that is sure to turn up again next month is called “Love at the Thanksgiving Parade.” One scene is supposed to take place in late November in Chicago. The good-looking guy and good-looking girl are shopping at a supermarket. There do not appear to be any doors at the front of the store; just several entranceways in which the two folks — and other shoppers — stroll in and out.

It was night and holiday lights twinkled as shoppers bundled against the cold and moved about.

But, of course, being a person in the HVACR industry, my thoughts turned to more practical matters, such as, “Is it really a good thing for a supermarket to let in a lot of cold outside air?” I guess it would be good for the refrigeration equipment as outside ambient would help take the load off the mechanical cooling. But what about the rest of the store where customers need some heat in Chicago in late November?

I suppose there could be some heaters over the entrance way but I didn’t sense their presence in the movie — and isn’t that a pretty costly way to control climate in the store versus some automatic doors like you typically see in a supermarket?

I muttered these musings to my wife as we watched the movie, but she kept hushing me because this was the critical point in the film when the good-looking guy and good-looking girl were starting to discover vulnerabilities in each other that would eventually lead to love.

And I guess in these movies, love means more than economical mechanical refrigeration systems.