Many people live in apartments. The vast majority of those apartment dwellers own a bed. Beds require sheets, and sheets need to be washed. Yet not every set of sheets will fit inside the compact washer and dryer that you typically find in an apartment. Why is this a problem? In short, there’s rarely any [...]

Let’s say you walk up to the front doors of a business, government office, or any other place that you expect to be open during the day. Unfortunately, the doors are locked. How frustrating would you find this experience to be? Although there may be several factors at play, chief among them is whether the [...]

If you’ve been following the weather lately, you may have heard about the huge snowfall in the pacific northwest. I had the bad luck of scheduling a short vacation for that very period, which made the travel challenging, to say the least. While I was sitting at the airport in Chicago and waiting for my [...]

The battery in one of my electronic devices started acting weird recently, so I looked up the problem online. As I quickly learned, a lot of other people were experiencing the same issue. The general recommendation was to bring the battery into the brand’s local store and ask for a free replacement, since the issue [...]

As more and more companies jump into the online grocery delivery business, I’ve been curious to see if any of them deliver to my area. So I’ve gone through the following scenario several times lately: – Read story or press release about new online grocery option – Visit their website to see where they deliver [...]

After researching the hotel options for an upcoming trip, I knew exactly which hotel I wanted to stay at. The only thing left was to pick the right type of room. Even though the property only had about 50 rooms in total, they claimed to offer six different room types. Once I read through the [...]

In the limited subset of stores and restaurants that I visited during the holidays, the Christmas music was anything but subtle. Every year, it seems, the music gets louder, and the selection of songs gets narrower. For whatever reason, the powers that be have decided that customers respond best to loud, repetitive holiday music. This [...]

The new grocery store in my neighborhood is rather massive, with two floors and an incredible selection of products. So when I needed wrapping paper for the holidays, I figured I could stop by and find plenty of choices there. However, the only gift wrap I saw was a rather sad collection of wrapping paper [...]

I always keep a relatively compact umbrella in my travel bag, though it takes up a fairly significant amount of space for something that I use so infrequently. So, I recently started looking for a smaller, lighter replacement. What I found is that a lot of different umbrellas are marketed with terms like these: – [...]

While working through my shopping list at a local store, I spotted a rather strange approach to product sampling. A particular tissue brand was apparently trying to get customers to touch and experience their new design. So, the product display contained a supply of tissues sticking out the front, along with a call to action [...]