Some Things Just Bother Me.

I have realized that some companies are better than others. There are mainly 2 things that bother me which seem very very easy to avoid. Of course there's always the things that anyone would complain about, such as dirty bathrooms, stuff being misorganized, anything that makes shopping hard... but i'm not talking about that. I'm talking about things that mainly go unnoticed because they do not harm business, and they don't yell out at you like a leaky faucet, or a stinky garbage can.

The first of my 2 complaints are stores with a lighted sign in the front. Only, they have a few letters where the bulb has burned out. Whenever i see a store that is missing a letter, it says to me that the management is lazy... or they are penny-pinchers who are looking to save a few bucks to increase profit. I know that if i had a store, and the sign read Owe s Importing and Exporting, It would be fixed that night or the next day. Period. To me, there is no better way to say to the customer, "Hey, I don't care enough about my store's outer appearance, so i don't care about you." This offense is equally as dissatisfying to me as a store who never washes the windows, with fingerprints and gunk stuck on. Lack of professionalism. That's what it says. So fix your signs, and get back to me.


Moving on... double doors.

Store managers... If you have a double door to your store, please, for the love of God, KEEP THEM BOTH UNLOCKED. Nothing creates awkward situations quite like a double door where only 1 door opens. Just think of how many times you have tried to walk into a store, you pull the handle, and it's locked... Just at that same instant, someone is exiting the store, and of course they're walking right for the unlocked door (the one you did not choose), so you have to go through the "will they open the door for me, or am i going to open the door for them?" dance. What good is a double door where only 1 door works? Essentially, they should've just saved the trouble of building 2 doors, and just made it 1... they put 2 doors there for a reason, they might as well use them... I'm not sure if people think it saves money on heating/AC bills to have only 1 door that opens, but to me... it's worth the extra 7 cents a month so that my customers will be able to enter and exit at their own will.

What makes this even worse, is when there's the double, double door. I've actually walked into a store that had the left door locked on the first stage of doors, and then on the second set, the right door was locked, so you essentially had to walk through the left door, then the right door to get into the store. Can you guess how many door handles i touched in that 30 seconds?

4, that's how many. All because i guessed wrong on the first set of doors, then assumed that the same side was going to be unlocked for the second go-round. Wrong. It is just infuriating to me that i have to go through this to enter your store... not to mention that anyone who guesses wrong looks and feels like an idiot for having problems opening the door to a very "open for business" store. Its almost the same feeling as walking up to a store window at 9:05 when they close at 9 and having them lock you out... you feel like an a moron for not knowing that they closed.

Even when 1 of the doors is broken, this is still unacceptable to me. Once again, if i had my own store, this would be fixed immediately... I would call whoever i needed to get this fixed. Pay whatever i need to make it better. And if they can't do it until friday, then they really don't deserve my business, and i'll replace those inconvenient to fix doors with something that i know is going to work. Even if i have to do it myself.

In conclusion, I've seen what it takes to keep a store at the top of the game when it comes to appearance and customer service, and i've seen the lengths that some store owners/managers take to ensure their customer's satisfaction. It's not so much as something they do, but just their general attitude to the way that they treat their customers and their investments to make them as perfect as they can day in and day out. If i ever own a store, you can be damn sure that both the doors will be unlocked during business hours, and the sign will have all working lights. I guarantee it.