Each time I go to Target to stock up on things, it seems like I get less and less value from the experience. In particular, the money I save compared to buying the same things at the closest grocery store or online seems less important. It’s not that I value the money any differently now compared to a year ago. But for whatever reason, the nagging annoyances of the big box shopping experience have increased the non-monetary costs of shopping at places like Target, and I doubt I’ll be doing much of it in the future.

For the most part, people shop at Target, Wal-Mart, and similar stores because of the low prices. But if my experience is any indication, this only lasts until the next good thing comes along, and the cost savings no longer seem worth it. For example, as people’s salaries increase over time, they’re less likely to give up convenience just to save a few dollars. But in today’s economy, that’s probably a small group at best.

Rather, the bigger challenge is what happens to low-price shoppers when new purchasing methods appear. For me, the emergence of Amazon Grocery as a viable source for more than half of my non-perishable food and household supplies means that I’m not buying that stuff at Target anymore. Of course, it hurts my local grocer too, but I’ve gone from shopping at Target every 1-2 months to probably once every 9 months. That’s a big difference, all because Amazon showed up with prices that are close enough to Target’s that I won’t even think about going there for anything Amazon carries.

What’s the point of this discussion? Retailers that sell on price are especially vulnerable to shoppers outgrowing the store as they become wealthier, find other low-cost suppliers, or change their priorities with respect to time and money. Sure, Wal-Mart and Target continue to dominate US retail. But I wonder how long that advantage will last if Amazon expands its grocery operations and other online stores follow suit.

In brief: if you sell on price, virtually any change in the marketplace can take customers away overnight. Without a fantastic in-store experience to bring people back, you’re just another chore to be reduced or eliminated when something better comes along. Ironically, the new winner doesn’t have to beat you on price. They just have to be more convenient than your offering without charging significantly more for the same products.

After visiting several stores and restaurants this past weekend, I was reminded of the differences between staff who are genuinely nice, and those who are just pretending to be nice. The first group actually cares about your experience at their restaurant, store, or other venue. But the second group is only reading the script and smiling on cue because their boss told them to. Here’s a few examples of each:

Businesses where I’ve found the staff to be genuinely nice:

– Starbucks (about 75% of the time)
– Trader Joe’s
– Potbelly Sandwich Works
– Flight 001 (a superb store if you’re lucky enough to live in a city that has one)

Businesses where the staff just seems to be faking it to earn a paycheck:

– Starbucks (the other 25% of the time)
– Any department store cosmetic counter
– Specialty clothing stores (like J. Crew)
– Virtually any museum
– Anything real estate related (brokers, leasing offices, etc.)
– Car dealers
– Hotels

I don’t know enough about these companies to say what makes the first group so genuine, and the second group so empty and stilted. But there’s definitely a difference, and it’s worth thinking about as you hire, train, and create incentive plans for your own staff members.

Like many modern highrises, the building where I live has digital signage displays in the elevators. And it’s not even the fancy kind that folks like Captivate and OMN provide. Nope, ours are the low-tech variety, with just a series of slides about building info and events.

I really didn’t pay any special attention to the screens until recently, when they started to break a lot. I began seeing messages about files that couldn’t be found, or weird errors with the screen frozen behind them. Based on how often I see the building maintenance crew in the elevator with a laptop plugged into the screen, I’m guessing they spend several hours each week fixing these problems.

Granted, they’re using old technology without any sort of remote updating or diagnostic capability. But the takeaway here is bigger than any one choice of technology. The real question is: do the people in charge, presumably building management, have any clue how much time their staff spends fixing the screens? Has anyone looked into the cost savings of just replacing the flaky technology? I’m guessing no on both counts.

Why don’t the people on the front lines report this sort of thing to their boss? My guess is that they’re afraid of being critized, as if the boss would say the problem is due to the employee’s lack of skill. Obviously, this is a shame. Perhaps I’m a bit biased, since my company sells digital signage technology that’s considerably more reliable than what I’ve talked about today. But no matter what technology or application you’re working with, users have an obligation to let the higher-ups know when things are broken beyond repair. Armed with that info, the powers that be can look at whether it’s cost effective to replace the flaky gear with a more reliable product, rather than keep spending time and money to help the old system limp along.

It’s bad enough that online stores automatically send you a catalog after the first order, without asking your permission. It’s even worse that they rarely honor your list removal requests, or they just subscribe you again next time. But another recent trend really pisses me off: printing your name in places besides the address label.

From what I’ve seen, Office Depot is the worst offender. They print your name on the front cover of the catalog, and again on an inside page. Maybe this personalization increases the open rates and response rates, or someone just thinks it does. Either way, it’s quite annoying for a privacy-conscious consumer, since they have to look for and shred those extra pages.

This catalog design stinks aesthetically as well. Office Depot prints your name in all caps, and the font and ink clearly don’t match the surrounding text. It screams “mail merge”, “cookie cutter”, or just plain “cheap”. In turn, this surely hurts their brand in the face of customers. Coupled with the practical implications I described above, it’s no surprise that most catalog retailers have avoided this path. I only hope it stays that way.

Do you remember those tests in elementary school that were supposed to help you learn about following directions? Typically, the test would ask dozens of long questions only to have the last question say “Skip all the other questions and write ‘Done’ on the page”. The idea, of course, was to teach the importance of reading the instructions, which inevitably said “Read all the questions carefully before you begin”. Indeed, it was quite annoying to waste your time doing it all wrong, especially when other kids already knew the ruse.

Fast forward a few decades, and people still don’t know how to follow directions. Case in point: I’ve been interviewing potential hires, and one of the things we ask them for is a 50 word writing sample. There’s really nothing tricky about it. Yet some people always write something that’s twice as long, and one person gave us nearly a whole page. If they can’t follow such a simple set of instructions, it certainly doesn’t bode well for their attention to detail in the work environment.

Maybe these people never had the benefit of those cruel yet effective tests in grade school. Or perhaps they’re just sloppy and can’t be bothered to double check their work. Either way, it makes me think that schools at all levels need to do a better job of teaching people to read and understand the instructions pertaining to any given task. Otherwise, you end up with output that doesn’t meet the requirements and constraints of the project, and that person never reaches their full potential within the organization.

A lot of people get carried away with the CC feature when sending emails, seemingly including everyone from their boss to their coworkers to last year’s summer interns. Usually, the idea is to prevent anyone from saying they weren’t kept in the loop. But the result is that you end up generating a ton of extra emails that waste people’s time and energy.

We could probably all benefit from using a little more restraint with the CC feature. That’s obvious. But what happens when you receive a message that already has a laundry list of people in the CC field? From what I’ve seen, people are pretty inconsistent in how they handle this. Sometimes they’ll reply to the whole list, but other times they only include the sender. And this selection appears haphazard, since the same person can waver from one behavior to the next in the same email thread.

I propose a simple rule of thumb to make things easier. The next time you get an email where a bunch of people are CC’d, check whether the message contains a question. If there’s a question involved, and you’re replying with the answer, then it makes sense to CC the original list by using the Reply All option. But if there’s no question to begin with, or you’re not providing an answer in your reply, it’s fine to get rid of the CC crowd and reply to the sender alone. Sure, this approach isn’t perfect, but it’s an effective way to keep groups in the loop precisely when they’re expecting to see an answer — while eliminating a lot of the extraneous banter that clogs up people’s inboxes.

It’s amazing how much the weather forecast for the same future period can change from one day to the next. For instance, they originally expected this past weekend in Chicago to be in the mid-90s, but they revised the forecast a few days later to the mid-80s. And when the weekend actually came around, it barely got above 80.

With this in mind, it would be helpful if the forecast was accompanied by some extra data. In particular, I’d like to see a “confidence rating” that shows how likely the forecast is to be accurate. In other words, they would run some calculations to see how accurate the past forecasts for this date ended up being, given the same amount of lead time before the actual date in question. Or if that type of historical data doesn’t exist, they could display some sort of standard deviation to illustrate how much the observed temperatures on a certain date tend to vary from the long-term averages.

Either way, the goal is the same: give customers a way to evaluate an estimate based on the performance of similar estimates in the past. If the historical data says that the estimate isn’t very accurate under the given set of conditions, or that the value in question often fluctuates wildly, people will put less stock in it and plan accordingly.

If the folks making these estimates aren’t comfortable saying things like “We’re only 40% confident in today’s weather forecast”, they can just create a scale to express relative confidence. Using a range from A to C should do the trick. In any event, the additional data would make the predictions a lot more useful, and increase the trust that customers place in them — even when things turn out differently than expected.

If you have a broadband Internet connection at home, you’re probably familiar with the seemingly universal troubleshooting process for when problems arise. Can’t connect? Sites loading slowly? Just power cycle the modem and router. These steps are so deeply ingrained in the tech support process that you can be sure the support rep will ask you to perform them — even if you diligently followed the same mantra before picking up the phone.

Thus, I admit with some embarrassment that I had a very typical broadband issue recently: some pages wouldn’t load. I rebooted all the gear, but things still weren’t right. So, I contacted tech support and asked them to check for routing problems on their network. They said all was fine, and asked me to not just reboot my modem, but to unplug and reconnect all the cables too. I followed their instructions, and somehow the problem was resolved.

Later, I figured out why their rebooting process worked and mine didn’t. While I was fishing out cables and reconnecting them, the modem and router were turned off. This extra delay, which perhaps only amounted to 30 more seconds, apparently cleared out some cached information that my earlier 10 second power cycle did not. In a roundabout way, this brings me to the moral of the story for customers and support reps alike: when a troubleshooting process involves turning things on and off, it pays to wait a little bit longer than you think. Somehow, a lot of gremlins can be vanquished in those few extra seconds.

I’m no expert on the TV business. But when I see a series getting cancelled after the first season, I would guess it’s because the show didn’t generate adequate ratings or ad sales. With this in mind, it’s surprising that the DVD sets for these orphaned series often sell for premium prices. For instance, HBO’s short-lived “John from Cincinatti” (awesome series, by the way) was $50 on Amazon. With many popular series selling in the $30 range, that’s way too much.

This reflects a fundamental problem with how the DVD sets for a cancelled series are being priced. Once a series is no longer in production, the main revenue sources for the network are DVD sales and rentals, iTunes downloads, and maybe some syndication. But for any of these to pan out, the show has to get exposure to a larger audience that actually wants to see it. Of course, the lack of a sizable audience is usually why shows are cancelled in the first place.

In many ways, using a standard pricing model for a show that only lasted a single season cripples any chances the show has of living on through greater distribution. Whether it’s a DVD set or iTunes version, these ill-fated series should be priced on the cheap, or at least no higher than the average for all shows. Even better, sell them as a two-for-one deal where buyers can send a free copy to a friend. By building interest this way and eliminating the high price barrier that scares curious buyers away, the show may finally get the exposure it needs to generate decent revenues in the afterlife.

Many computers and electronic devices have a cooling fan. Most of these fans can run at different speeds, depending on the ambient temperature and how hard the innards of the device are working at any given time. But these same devices are really bad at warning you when they run into trouble, e.g. the room is too hot or something is making the processor stay at full load. When problems strike, they keep running the fan at full speed, or just shut down abruptly.

Obviously, the technology for monitoring and regulating the temperature is already there. Why not take this one step further, and actually let the user know when thermal problems are about to strike? That’s a lot better than the silent, almost pathetic way that most devices overheat and shut down today.