In California, gas stations usually show three prices: regular, mid-grade, and premium. Sometimes diesel is shown. Even if there is small text to explain what those prices refer to, we mostly go off of familiarity, knowing what each box in sequence is telling us.

This sign from a Speedway station in western Michigan uses a fourth slot to indicate price for another item: cigarettes. Gas stations and smokes seem to go together better in MI than in CA.

Missing Letters, Holland, MI

I’m intrigued by stuff in the urban ecosystem that is deployed but untended. Consider this sign at the edge of a shopping plaza on a busy busy street. How long has it been like that? Has anyone who is accountable for the sign noticed? Is someone paying for advertising that they aren’t getting?

Compare with computer displays in airports showing a Windows error, or the piece of gum left on a realtor’s “about this property” display after the owners have moved out. Entropy, man.

(and probably some analogies with semi-smart automated systems that don’t get context 100% of the time)

Our CCA class just finished a “user experience audit” of BART and found dozens of aspects of the whole experience that are sub-optimal. I’ll add this one (although maybe one of them saw this as well).

Step 1 – remember your stall number.

Too bad this sign is posted in the ticket-buying area of the station, far far away from your car off in the parking lot. It should read Go back to your car, dumbass, and write down the four digit number and then come back here and look at step 2. Their guidance is not presented at a useful point in the process, at all.

Last week I dialed my cell phone with my 4-digit parking code so that I could “remember” it. There’s one machine for buying tickets, and then through the turnstiles is the next machine for paying for parking (“the paid area”). So even if you walk from your car muttering 3214 over and over again, you still have to use a number-heavy interface to select the value of your ticket, enter your ATM password and so on, and that’s likely to wipe out your short-term memory.

But I only learned this from failure. All of which makes this sign so unhelpful.

The Sheriff Dept is (.)(.)U! You need Help!!!

Seen on a walk in our neighborhood in Montara. We have no idea what this is about. Another small town mystery!

“To our valued customers:
In cooperation with the
recent FDA warning we
have pulled all fresh
spinach.”

This is a terrible sign. The grocer in this AP photo has simply attempted to cover their ass for not stocking the produce we might be searching for. There’s no helpful information about the FDA warning – we’re supposed to know about it. There’s an opportunity here to help people and remind them not to each spinach for the duration of this situation.

And what the hell does it mean to “have pulled” spinach? This is not how people communicate, this is how merchandisers talk.

I realize this is a reactive sign and not a lot of time was spent in composing it (although it’s not hand-written, it’s somewhat professional looking, so there was some measure of care), but the jargon and self-referential tone is disappointing.

I experienced something similar in a recent email

Mr. Portigal,

Sorry, you are having problems with your Salter Electronic Scale Model 929. The people of Taylor Precision Products take great pride in producing quality products. Salter Model 929 has a ten years warranty. Please return the scale to Taylor. Taylor does not require a receipt or the original box. Please enclose a brief note with your name, return address, explanation of problem. Kindly put the note inside a box with
the scale, return to the following:

[blah]

Once your scale is received it will be replaced with a new Salter Model 929. Taylor than will mail the new scale back to the consumer. Turn around time of two to three weeks. I do hope this information proves to
be helpful to you.

How, in the course of a couple of short paragraphs, did “Mr. Portigal” morph into “the consumer”? Suddenly they are talking about me, not to me. What?

Not to grossly oversimply, but could it be that organizations spend too much time thinking about themselves, and not the people that they serve? The colloquial term is “drinking the Kool-Aid” and many companies, small and large, turn that into an asset that attracts and retains employees (“a strong culture”) but also presumably excites customers. But there’s a heavy black line on an org chart somewhere that splits the internal dialogs from the external ones, and the strong culture builds in shorthands and buzzwords that alienate and exclude the people on the outside – the ones that those companies are in business to serve.

The business press (and even worse, the blogosphere) is filled with enthusiastic writing about infectious passionate customer/marketing/blah but things are far far messier than any of those authors would want you to believe.

Marin Oriental Rug House, slightly dodging the cliche that all such establishments are always “going out of business” – they offer the shopper the chance to shop at going out of business PRICES. Going out of business is no longer a state of being, it’s an attribute.

Nice.

I was fooled when I drove by and took this picture (while making a left-hand turn, even); it wasn’t til looking at the picture later that I see their little dodge.

I was amazed to see the Starbucks logo as this ridiculous afterthought to the Marriott sign. Does the Starbucks brand really endorse any environment that strongly that they need to tag it onto the hotel sign?

Kiss Your Beer, Hong Kong, January 2006

Here’s an amazing advertisement for Budweiser, from Hong Kong. With the phase American Kiss across the middle, and the slogan Kiss Your Beer – Kiss Budweiser.

Drink it, if I have to, but kiss it? No way. Perhaps it’s a great image for Hong Kong, but it’s amazing how wrong it seems for us here.

Beware of Pickpocket

I’m slowly posting photos over at flickr into this set. I think there’s over 70 there as I write this, with an enormous amount still to come.

We saw this sign in a window in downtown Banff. Seemed like a sign o’ the times, perhaps they have many obese (or otherwise large) travellers coming and asking if they offer such sizes, so in order to capitalize on the frequency of such trade, they put up a sign.