When I visited Trader Joe’s over the weekend, the cashier asked for my zipcode. That’s a common question in many retailers, but unheard of at this one. I asked him why they were collecting that info, and he said they’re trying to figure out where customers live in order to choose the locations for their next few stores.

I don’t know how they plan to crunch these numbers, but it’s interesting to look at a few options for making sense of the data. In the most simplistic approach, you would add up the raw number of shoppers in each zipcode, and put new stores in the areas with the most shoppers. But that’s a mistake, since it doesn’t take into account the number of lost customers who never shop there in the first place.

For instance, almost nobody in my area shops at Trader Joe’s. It’s too far away, and most people are fairly lazy about their shopping habits. Almost every grocery bag I see is from the two closest grocery stores. However, a ton of these people would shop at Trader Joe’s if it was close by. But if those people don’t make the trek there today and never get their zipcode counted, how is the corporate office going to know that a new store should be placed there?

The solution is to look at those zipcodes that account for relatively few customers, but where the total residential population is large. If you’re only capturing say 1% of the people who live in an area because the existing stores are too far away, then adding a new store in that area should be a very profitable endeavor. As another data point, you can look at the average monthly spend from customers in those relatively distant areas. All else equal, if customers from a certain area tend to make big purchases or come to the store more often than the typical shopper, that area should be even more attractive for a new location.

Determining where to open new stores is a complicated task, and I’m sure many more factors come into play besides the ones I’ve mentioned here. But regardless of the process you use to select new locations, try to keep an open mind and don’t place too much emphasis on where your existing customers are coming from. After all, you want to attract new customers that wouldn’t shop with you otherwise, rather than just shifting around the customers you have today.

On Saturday, I tried out a new 24-hour breakfast place. As the hostess led us to our table, we walked past numerous empty booths and tables near the front of the restaurant, and found ourselves deep in the bowels of the venue. I politely rejected this location, and asked for a booth instead. The hostess then gave us a nice booth near the front, and all was well.

Here’s what I’m wondering: why seat people in back when there’s space in front? More specifically, the restaurant should be filling tables by the windows first, then the ones that are a bit further in, and so on. If you shoehorn all the customers into the back of the dining room, the place looks empty from the outside, even if it’s actually quite active inside.

By keeping a steady supply of customers seated near the windows, you’ll attract a lot more of the window shoppers who are on the fence about eating there, along with people who just stumble past the place by chance. The logic is simple: take the customers you already have, seat them in plain view of the folks outside, and more people will come inside to eat. If some of those people ask for a table in the back, fine. But for those who don’t have a preference, you’re much better off placing them near your windows, entrance, or any other location that’s highly visible from the outside looking in.

If I remember correctly from my first microeconomics course, “price elasticity” refers to the often tricky relationship between price changes and the volume sold. It seeks to answer a simple question: if we raise prices, will people still be willing to buy enough units to keep our revenues at the same or a higher level as they were before? Conversely, if we lower prices, will the increase in units sold give us higher total revenues?

This concept seems to baffle organizations of all shapes and sizes. The examples are everywhere:

– State governments increase income taxes, without considering how many people will leave the state and deplete the tax base.

– Transit agencies raise fares, without thinking about the number of people that will cut back on their use of public transit.

– Traditional airlines impose fees on checked luggage, without any data on how many customers will switch to low-cost carriers that don’t charge those fees.

Granted, the impact of a price change can be hard to predict. But if you blindly proceed with raising prices or adding fees without considering the number of customers that you’re driving away, you may quickly find that your total revenues actually go down in the process. This is a very real risk that many companies just ignore. In short, if you’re not scared by the prospect of alienating customers while generating less revenue, you’re probably not being honest with yourself about how quickly those customers can pick up and leave when you treat them poorly.

Email signatures have become a dumping ground for all sorts of unnecessary and ironic text. For example:

– “This email may contain confidential information.” Email is not a secure communications channel, so why are you sending confidential info in the first place?

– “Please consider the environment before printing this message.” Since every byte of data sent online consumes a small but measurable amount of power, the extra cycles required to deliver this pro-environment request are actually using up energy and draining natural resources in the process.

– “Call my 24/7 direct line.” I rarely have a need to call people after hours, but I can think of many times where I’ve dialed a number that was labeled this way, and it went to voice mail. If you’re going to talk up 24/7 access, you should probably make sure that someone’s answering the phone for you.

Bloated email signatures are a widespread phenomenon, especially in big companies where the IT department is presumably told to insert things like the confidentiality text in every employee’s email configuration. But if you’re lucky enough to control your own email settings, try to think of your email signature like an ad or a business card. Customers, vendors and colleagues see it dozens or hundreds of times during the course of a relationship, so it’s best not to inundate them with useless or ironic content that does nothing for the conversation.

While riding in a taxi last week, I came across one of those newfangled credit card machines that has a digital signage screen built into it. Basically, it’s a small display with local news updates in one zone, and ads in the other zones, attached to a credit card reader. Aside from the video quality being absolutely terrible, the ad space puzzled me. I guess nobody has bought any ads, since it just said “Your ad here” during my entire taxi ride.

However, what really stood out to me was the call-to-action. One panel said “Your ad here”, as I mentioned above. The other panel said “Email” and then the address of a website. That doesn’t make any sense: if you want someone to visit your website, you should use words like “visit us” or “learn more”. If you ask them to email you, then provide an email address. And if you ask them to call you, make sure to follow that up with a phone number.

It’s not rocket science: just do a basic reality check to verify that your call-to-action makes sense. Otherwise, if you present potential customers with an incomplete or mismatched set of instructions, your conversion rates will suffer while they spend time trying to figure out what you’re asking them to do.

During a typical trip, I use my laptop in a variety of places around the airport. Here’s how I would rank them, from most productive to least productive:

– Wrap-around desk with proper office chair (San Francisco-SFO)
– Countertop with bar stools (Chicago Midway-MDW)
– Oversized recliner-style chairs (Midway again)
– Regular airport waiting areas (various)
– On the floor near a pillar (I like Vancouver-YVR, but they seriously need to add power outlets for travelers to use in restaurants, coffee shops and other convenient locations)

I wish more airports would follow the lead of SFO with its nicely-appointed desks and MDW with its countertops. It really makes a huge difference in productivity when you have access to a sort-of-normal work space, which makes that airport a lot more attractive the next time you’re booking travel plans. All considered, upgrading the laptop work areas is a low-cost way to attract additional passengers and boost revenues. Just like how coffee shops sell more drinks when customers linger longer, airports could generate higher concession revenue by providing a more productive place to spend time before a flight.

When you’re going out to lunch or dinner with a business associate, a few basic guidelines apply. In my experience, it’s good etiquette to pay for the meal when you are:

– The person doing the selling, if the relationship is that of customer (or prospect) to vendor
– The person who invited the other one to lunch
– The person who added a bunch of colleagues to the dining party, if the original plan was for only a few
– The one who insisted on a very expensive restaurant (e.g. more than $25 per person)

Obviously, there are exceptions to these rules, and a lot of scenarios create overlap between them. Plus, many people would argue that the vendor-customer relationship trumps all the others. But if you consistently find yourself in a situation where you should have paid but didn’t when dining with a particular customer or other associate, it’s probably a good idea to pick up the tab next time.

Earlier this week, I was on the phone with an airline to ask why they had changed my reserved seat to a different, much crappier one. The customer service rep basically told me they screwed up but had no way of assigning me the original seat again. I could get into other details, but I want to focus on one aspect of the conversation. Specifically, the airline rep said she was “sorry” at least three or four times.

Virtually anyone who has studied customer service will tell you that empathizing with the customer and saying you’re sorry for the hassle is a good way to set the tone for a productive conversation. However, you need to actually take steps after that to actually resolve the issue and make things right. If you don’t fix the problem that made the customer upset to begin with, even the most sincere apology won’t get you very far.

Looking at this another way, an apology is only valuable if it’s sincere. If you train customer service reps to read from a script where they keep saying I’m sorry without empowering them to fix the underlying problem, customers will see right through it. The fake apology makes the customer even more irate. After all, they figure, only an idiot would fall for such an insincere attempt at empathy. So if you’re involved with customer service planning, try toning down the repetitive usage of “I’m sorry” or “We screwed up”, and dedicate those cycles to actually resolving the problems that made your customers call you in the first place.

While going through some travel documents, I came across a few unused flight credits from Northwest Airlines. I actually tried to use them once, but there was some technical issue with the Northwest website. Rather than throwing them away, I decided to contact the airline and find out if they were still valid. As you probably know, Northwest merged with Delta, so I opened up the Delta website to research the issue. The Delta site wouldn’t understand the old Northwest voucher numbers, so I had to contact customer service.

My goal was to simply email the flight voucher numbers to Delta and have them email me back with the balance and expiration date of each one. I quickly located the link for “Email us”. But when I clicked that link, it took me to a gigantic form with about a dozen required fields. Undeterred, I finally found the customer service email address, but it took much longer than it should have.

Here’s the issue: when you call a link “Email us”, people expect that it’s going to take them to a page where the customer service email address is listed. Then, they can use that email address to get in touch with you, leveraging the same email program and interface that they use all the time. Email is easy, familiar, and predictable. However, if you make the “Email us” link point to something entirely different — like a big, ugly form — it conflicts with the customer’s expectations and makes them frustrated.

In short, buttons and links should fulfill the implicit promise that their text and appearance create. If a link says “Email us”, it should lead to an email address. If that same button takes customers to a form or a phone number — without any way to get to the email address — then the promise is never fulfilled and customer satisfaction will suffer.

Compare these two grocery shopping scenarios:

– You’re totally out of the basic foods that you eat on a regular basis, so you have to visit the store.

– You have plenty of the essentials in the pantry, but you want to try out some new things for the fun of it.

Virtually any store can attract customers in the first case. But it’s the second scenario that leads to the sale of higher-margin items like a more expensive brand of wine or a gourmet chocolate bar. If I had to guess, stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s capture a lot more customers from the second group, which adds immensely to the bottom line.

Indeed, the same is probably true for any business. If you can convince customers to spend more time in your store or on your website when there’s nothing forcing them to be there, you’ll sell more of your high-margin products. After all, these are precisely the products that people want to buy because they’re fun, enjoyable and perhaps a bit out of the ordinary.