When you’re setting the rules for a public place — like a library, airport, or train station — it makes sense to prohibit behaviors that are likely to annoy a bunch of people at once. For example, you can’t play music out loud in most venues, since everyone else can hear it and they have no easy way to avoid that inconvenience.

The rules and expectations seem well established for music. But what about smells? Occasionally, you hear about somebody being thrown off a plane because they have obscene body odor. However, BO is only one small part of the problem. The real issue lies with food — fast food to be exact.

It doesn’t matter which restaurant the food comes from. Typical fast food products like burgers, fries, and hot dogs just smell nasty — and the smell carries for dozens if not hundreds of feet from the person eating it. The problem is even worse when someone brings it into close quarters like a plane, bus or train. Basically, it turns into smell pollution.

Is there anything that venue owners and policymakers can do about this? Well, I’m sure they could take action, but they probably won’t. After all, venues depend on the fast food operators to lease concession spaces, or provide revenue through sponsorships. Perhaps someone can invent a type of food deodorant to put on the containers, to at least limit the intensity of the smells. But I won’t hold my breath on that one. Then again, with all the nasty smells out there, I might have to.

A few days ago, I felt a sudden and compelling urge to clean my coffeemaker. Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit. Motivations aside, I did take out all the removable parts and give them a good wash and rinse. Maybe I’ve repressed the memories of the last time I cleaned the thing, but I was shocked at how many places that coffee grounds can build up inside the device. Plus, the four or so different parts that you can take out have lots of sharp edges, making the process even dicier.

I would love to make a video of the cleaning process and send it to the designers who created the coffeemaker. Why? I doubt many design teams think about the ongoing care that a product requires, such as what the owner will have to do during cleaning or other maintenance. As a result, this aspect of the user experience never comes into play when crafting requirements for future product designs.

The problem isn’t limited to coffeemakers, of course. Think about how many channels and gaps and crevices a typical car interior has, or the difficulty of cleaning the keyboard on a laptop computer. Even products that are made to be cleaned all the time, like electric toothbrushes, seem to have been created without any regard for the cleaning process.

Granted, I doubt there’s a direct profit incentive to make things that are simple to clean. But all else equal, I bet consumers would vote with their wallets if they had the chance to buy a product that was easier to clean and take care of than the alternatives.

…does not constitute an emergency on my part.

I think I first ran into that saying in high school, but certainly no later than college. After a recent interaction with some rather unprepared people, I started thinking about the saying and how well it’s stood the test of time.

With the advent of the Internet and everything being automated and centralized and web-based, you might think there would be fewer last-minute crises in a given project. But the opposite seems to be true: projects have just as many moving parts and points of failure as they did when everything was analog. And if you need people with specialized skills to make the technology behave, you’d better make sure they’re available ahead of time.

Ultimately, it comes down to people and tasks and organization. If you’ve built a project structure or company culture where people budget their time wisely and manage vendor relationships with respect, you won’t have a nightmare in the last 48 hours before something is due. But if you just sail along blindly and hope it works out in the end, you may find that the people and technology you need to get the project done simply aren’t available on a moment’s notice.

In some industries, the bar is set so low that anyone who shows even basic competence looks like a superstar. Case in point: I emailed a prospective vendor with some questions. They responded within a few hours and answered my questions clearly — using no fewer than seven complete sentences, I might add.

From what I’ve seen, most people working in that particular industry are borderline illiterate and severely condescending to customers, which is hardly a great formula for sales success. And yes, the inept jerks manage to get by just fine. Maybe they have strong connections with buyers or there’s only a very limited number of people trying to take their place. No matter what the cause, talented and competent vendors are few and far between.

With the bar set so low, it’s especially nice to find a vendor that actually has a clue how to interact with customers and treats you with respect. I only wish there was something I could do as a customer to help drive more business towards the people that actually know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with industries where word-of-mouth is virtually nonexistant, the incumbent bozos are bound to stick around for a lot longer than you’d expect.

If you’ve purchased a lamp in the past decade or so, chances are you noticed the warning label near the bulb socket. For instance:

“To reduce the risk of fire, use 60 watt maximum bulb.”

Seems simple enough, right? Make sure the bulb is 60W or less, and you’re fine. There’s just one problem: the wattage ratings make no sense for energy-efficient CFL bulbs. And considering that CFL bulbs last for years and use less power than regular ones, it stands to reason that a whole lot of consumers will be putting CFLs into their lamps.

Ok, so back to the problem: the safety labels on lamps show the wattage ratings for regular bulbs, but CFLs need an entirely different scale. For instance, a 15W CFL may produce the same amount of light as a 60W incandescent bulb. If the lamp says 60W max, you’re fine either way. But what if you want to use a 25W CFL that produces 100W worth of light? Does the 100W equivalent brightness trump the 25W of actual power draw?

From what I’ve read, you go by the actual power draw of the bulb. So, a 15W or 25W or 50W CFL is fine in a lamp that says 60W max — even if those CFLs are way brighter than a 60W incandescent bulb. Clearly, consumers shouldn’t have to look this up online. The warning labels on the lamps should cover both cases. For example:

“To reduce the risk of fire, use 60 watt maximum bulb. For CFL bulbs, this refers to the power draw, not the brightness.”

Granted, there are probably all sorts of government regulations that dictate the language that appears on the warning stickers. So maybe the CFL-specific language would have to go on a second label, or on an insert in the box. Even if the implementation is less than elegant, anything that helps reduce the confusion over CFL wattage would be a big improvement for consumers.

I get restaurant menus, flyers, and coupons in the mail quite regularly. Judging by their marketing efforts, I’m guessing most of these new venues won’t last more than six months. Typically, the places sending out flyers are nowhere near my apartment, or they’re priced too high, or they’re too generic to justify switching from my favorite establishments.

With this in mind, here are some things that every restaurant should do when sending out a mailer:

– Pick a sensible geographic area. It’s a waste of time and money to blanket the whole city with flyers, when your customers are likely to live within a few miles of the restaurant.

– Explain why people should give you a try. In today’s economy, people have finite restaurant budgets. So, trying a new restaurant probably means snubbing an old favorite. If your food is better or fresher or different, make that clear. If your atmosphere is nicer, throw in some pictures to prove it.

– Include a coupon or discount offer. Unless you’re Rick Bayless, simply announcing the new restaurant opening probably won’t attract enough customers to pay the bills. By providing a financial incentive to give the place a try, you’ll get a lot more customers in the door and help build word-of-mouth.

Granted, these tips still won’t help you overcome a bad location or bad food or an oversaturated market segment. But if you do have the basic ingredients for a successful business in place, telling people about it the right way should vastly increase your chance of success.

Some stores have a dedicated “customer service” desk to handle things like returns and exchanges. When nobody has a transaction like that, the register just functions like any other checkout lane. Other stores do away with the notion entirely, and let any register handle special transactions. But is getting rid of the customer service desk really a good idea?

Normally, I’d say yeah, it’s better for shoppers if they can go to any register to do a return. However, my experience last weekend in a clothing store changed my mind. I went in there to exchange a shirt that was defective, and saw huge lines at all the checkout areas. Surely, I figured, they had some area dedicated to returns and exchanges. So I asked an employee, and she told me I’d have to wait in the same humongous line as people who were making regular purchases.

Well, the wait ended up being pretty short, since the checkout people were quite efficient. But I still felt snubbed that I had to wait in line again due to the store’s own screwup with quality control. All else equal, if you’re going to eliminate the customer service desk, you should at least designate a triage area for returns and exchanges during really busy periods. It doesn’t have to be fancy: just choose one or two checkout lanes and instruct the staff to call out for returns before they take regular sales transactions. That way, customers won’t feel like you’re penalizing them for having the misfortune of getting a defective product.

Many services are easier, faster, and less painful when the customer invests in a little bit of preparation. For instance:

– If you’re having your carpets cleaned, try moving the furniture out of the way beforehand.

– If you’re going to the dentist for a cleaning, try to brush right before the appointment.

– When you’re buying groceries, try helping the cashier pack the bags, rather than sitting back and doing nothing.

In each of these cases, the customer and the service provider are better off when the customer shows up prepared. They each save time, money, and hassle — or some combination of those elements — when the customer takes ownership in the process.

How can service providers get customers to chip in? Just tell customers what you’d like them to do and what’s in it for them. Sure, some people will ignore the suggestions. But others will take the hint and do what you’re asking. And as more and more people invest in improving their own experience, these behaviors will spread to a larger and larger portion of your customer base.

Virtually every public transportation system has signs in each train car, bus, and station telling you which behaviors are prohibited. For instance, you’re not allowed to panhandle on a train. But I frequently see people going through the train cars — and even hopping through the emergency exit doors — to beg for change. Never once have I seen police or security staff try to enforce the no panhandling rule. This makes me wonder: do the warning signs help at all?

The panhandlers probably don’t care about getting arrested, or feel confident they’ll never be caught, or are so crazy that they believe they’re trapped in another universe and are collecting change for their interdimensional trip back home. Either way, the widespread violation of the posted rules underscores the need to enforce them more effectively. If that’s not possible, I believe you’re better off not bothering with the empty threat that the signs represent. Get the funding for proper enforcement first, so the signage actually means something.

On Sunday, I walked into a retail store with a handful of printouts from the retailer’s website. This particular company provides no way to check which products are carried in stores versus online, let alone any type of inventory status for one store versus another. Anyways, after browsing the shelves and talking to several employees, I learned that none of the 5+ products I printed out was even carried in the store.

In an apparent attempt to follow a script that the corporate office provided, each of the staff members tried to give me other options. They could check another store or order the product to be shipped there. I declined the first option since the nearest store would have been quite a walk, and declined the second option because I wanted to get something right away. 8-10 business days, as they stated it, isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

This underscores the importance of providing instant gratification for retail shoppers. People don’t walk or drive to your store just to talk about the product and then have to go somewhere else — or wait more than a week — to actually obtain it. They visit the store to see the item and take it home right away. Anything less, and most people would probably prefer to buy it online.

So what can stores do if the product is out of stock or simply isn’t carried in retail inventory? For starters, help customers find the closest substitute so they have at least one option for taking a product home that day. If the product is available at another local store, offer to have it couriered over to the first store — or delivered to the customer’s home — the same day. And finally, if you’re faced with the last resort of ordering it for delivery in a week or so, make it worth the customer’s time to wait. Give them a discount on the order, or throw in a $20 coupon for next time. Not everyone will take you up on these offers, but the added revenue from those that do should help make the efforts worthwhile.