"This could easily degenerate into chaos, " concedes Paul Heitman, a senior program architect at Comverge, which hopes to extend its metering expertise for air-conditioning systems to plug-in cars.

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We've got more shopping malls than churches, we spend more time staring at Internet coupon sites than reading Shakespeare, we stomp on each other at 5 A.M. on Christmas Eve to snag that discounted laptop at Wal-Mart, a store that now sells buckets of popcorn, suggesting that shopping for Glade plug-in air fresheners is the entertainment equivalent of going to the movies.

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We've got more shopping malls than churches, we spend more time staring at Internet coupon sites than reading Shakespeare, we stomp on each other at 5 A.M. on Christmas Eve to snag that discounted laptop at Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ), a store that now sells buckets of popcorn, suggesting that shopping for Glade plug-in air fresheners is the entertainment equivalent of going to the movies.

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