It started with a rebate form. Actually, it started with a rebate form and a really bad flashlight.
In February 2023, our local municipal utility announced a lighting incentive program: $12 per qualifying LED retrofit lamp, effective March 1. I manage procurement for a 40-person hospitality company, and I’ve handled our facilities lighting budget for six years. That means I track every invoice, compare vendor quotes, and keep a color-coded spreadsheet for total cost of ownership. I’m the guy who calculates the payback of replacing a $4 lightbulb with a $14 one. So when the rebate notice landed, my first thought was not “nice.” It was “how do I get this without making the same mistake I made in 2020?”
That mistake was buying cheap LED lamps because they were cheap. But I’ll get to that.
The “Is track lighting outdated 2023” question
Our building has a café, a small events room, and a storefront with awnings. The events room has old track lighting from the original buildout. Eight tracks, 16 halogen heads, all pointed at paintings and string lights. The track heads looked tired, and one of my colleagues asked the question that became a meeting agenda item: “Is track lighting outdated in 2023?”
My immediate answer was “no,” but not because I’m loyal to old hardware. The track itself is just a bus. It’s the lampholders and lamps that matter. The “track lighting is outdated” idea comes from an era when cheap track systems were installed in nearly every suburban kitchen, with glaring halogens and no plan for what the light was supposed to do. That was true in the late 1990s. Today, a Cree LED light can be dropped into the same track with a narrow beam angle and low heat. It can light a painting or a menu board beautifully. What was best practice in 2003 is not best in 2023. But the basic principle is unchanged: the fixture is a tool, and you have to use it with intent.
To me, the real question was not “is track lighting outdated 2023” but “are we using track lighting correctly?” We weren’t. The halogen bulbs were cheap to replace but expensive to run, and they emitted so much heat that the artwork in the events room had started to feel warm to the touch (unfortunately, nobody had reported that until I ran my hand over the frames).
The $6 LED corner-cutting lesson
We needed 16 track replacements and 4 outdoor spotlight replacements for the awnings. Then, if the test went well, we’d replace the whole back-of-house lighting with LEDs.
I asked three electrical distributors for quotes. Vendor A offered an unbranded LED lamp at $6 per unit. Vendor B offered a Cree LED retrofit kit at $13.50 per unit, plus a note that their distributor rebate paperwork was already approved for the utility incentive. Vendor C didn’t return my call (maybe a sign, though probably not a reliable one).
I went back and forth for two weeks. On paper, Vendor A’s math was compelling: $96 instead of $216 for 16 lamps. We could keep the other $120 for a spare. My gut said to buy one from each, test them for a week, then order. The rebate deadline pushed me to buy quickly. I’m not proud of it (it was my decision, and I own it). I ordered all 32 from Vendor A because the price was impossible to ignore.
The first lamp failed in nine days. Then the flickering started—not all lamps, but enough that we noticed it. The worst part was the color mismatch. I bought 32 lamps with the same product code, and three of them were noticeably greenish, in the sort of way that makes a business sign look ugly. The electrician who did the install charged $350 in labor to swap the bad ones and re-check the rest. The $6 lamps turned out to cost me about $15 per unit after labor, and that’s before the extra drive time and the inconvenience.
People think expensive LEDs are expensive because the manufacturer is greedy. Actually, it’s the other way around: vendors who make consistent, reliable products can charge more because they spend more on engineering and quality control. The causation runs from quality to price, not from price to quality. It was a costly reminder.
“I told you to buy the Cree lamps,” our lead electrician said. “You didn’t ask me why. You asked me to find the cheapest quote.” He was right.
Testing Cree LED: spotlight awnings and track heads
After the Vendor A disaster, I went back to Vendor B. This time, I bought two different Cree LED track retrofit modules and one Cree outdoor floodlight. I installed them myself? No, that would be a lie. I asked the electrician to do it and I paid for his time with a clear conscience (my CFO signed off after I showed her the failed lamp photo).
The first thing I noticed was the beam control. The Cree LED spotlights for the track had a narrow 15-degree beam option, which meant fewer lamps could do the same job. We replaced four halogen heads in the events room with two Cree LED heads and got better light on the wall displays. The color temperature was consistent between lamps—something I now check with a small pocket color sensor, because I’ve been burned too many times to trust a product code alone.
For the awnings, we chose Cree LED floodlights with adjustable mounting brackets. The goal was to highlight the canopy and the sign, not the sidewalk. That’s what spotlight awnings are supposed to do. The old fixtures washed the entire storefront and wasted half the light upward into the night sky. Once we aimed the new Cree LED lights properly, the sign was bright and the ground pool of wasted light disappeared. We measured the power draw with a clamp meter: the two new fixtures together used 34 watts, compared with 250 watts for the old halogen floods. That’s on the manufacturer spec sheet, and our own meter confirmed the number during the first week.
For our entrance, the business spotlight that I had been trying to ignore for a year was also switched to a single Cree LED fixture. It’s a simple thing: a small die-cast housing, a Cree LED chip rated for 50,000 hours in the catalog. I don’t expect to touch it before the next budget cycle.
And yes, the flashlight connection: I keep a Cree LED flashlight in the maintenance closet. It was the best Cree LED flashlight for our needs because it’s bright, floody, and takes the same battery as our headlamps. It wasn’t the “best” in any objective sense. But when I used it to inspect ceiling junctions and dark corners, it made me realize how many problem areas our old lighting simply wasn’t reaching. A good light source doesn’t solve poor lighting placement; it just reveals it.
What the 2023 lighting audit actually changed
By June 2023, we had replaced almost every internal lamp with LED, and about half of the fixtures use Cree LED components or lamps. The track lighting stayed. It isn’t outdated; it’s more valuable now that the heads can be fitted with Cree LED modules that don’t overcook the room.
Cost-wise, we stopped fiddling with cheap bulbs. I built a simple TCO spreadsheet that includes purchase price, rated life, labor to replace, and the utility rebate. The “cheap” option usually loses if the failure rate is more than a few percent. I learned that after tracking 30+ orders over three years, a pattern is impossible to miss: most of our budget overruns did not come from premium products. They came from ordering budget products that failed twice.
If I could redo that decision, I would have ordered one $13.50 Cree lamp and one $6 unbranded lamp on the first day, run them in the same circuit for a week, and compared the light and the data. At the time, I thought the rebate deadline made speed more valuable than accuracy. But the rebate applied to qualifying lamps from both vendors. So buying the more expensive lamp would still have earned $12 each. The math was on the table. I just chose to ignore the quality factor until it cost me.
Looking back, the useful lesson wasn’t about Cree. It was about the difference between “this LED lamp is cheap” and “this LED lamp is cheap to own.” Cree LED light sources aren’t the only good option on the market, and I’m not going to claim they’re perfect for every application. But for our track heads, outdoor spotlights, and awning lighting, the Cree products had the beam control, consistency, and documented performance that a small business needs. That’s worth paying for. Whether you call it a business spotlight or a feature accent, the goal is the same: put light where it works, not where it’s cheap.
So, is track lighting outdated in 2023? No. But my approach to lighting procurement was, and I fixed it.