A few things have been pissing me off, so I’ll just consolidate it into one big bitching, whining post. If you own a business downtown, read this over and over and over until it makes sense.

Hours of Operation

For the love of god, set some hours you can deal with and stick to them. It helps if they make sense. This isn’t a huge deal in the suburbs, but nothing makes me want to stomp a bag of kittens to death like walking a few blocks to a store to find they’re closed, despite their “Hours” sign saying they should be open. It’s not a matter of driving to the next store when you live downtown, it’s a matter of walking another half mile.

It helps if your hours make sense. Second Street Shopper, which is otherwise a great store, is trying to push the food from their deli, yet they were still locked up tight at 10:30 this morning. Good luck selling breakfast when you open at noon.

Maybe I’m a lunatic; scratch that, I’m certainly a lunatic, but knowing that nearly every restaurant downtown has first shift come in at 10-10:30, I’d probably open at 9 every day. Call me fucking crazy.

Website

Kinda ties in with the first one. There’s no excuse for not having a basic website. Fucking contact me and I’ll do it. It costs nothing for basic domain registration, web hosting, and maybe a wordpress blog or joomla front end. There’s no reason to not have a page with your contact info and hours of operation.

Yes, you can call and find this info, but it does fuckall if they’re closed.

Hello, endlessly ringing phone? Yes, I’d like to know when you open. Oh, what’s that? Ring ring? Well mighty fine! I’ll see you then!

With a basic, nearly free website, you can bang it into google and say “Oh, 9am, cool”.

PDF Menus

Jesus tittyfucking christ, please make your menu available in html form, or at the very least scan or photograph the physical menu and link to the jpg/png/gif/etc. I don’t want to download your menu and deal with acrobat reader to see your soup of the day. PDF is for sharing printable files. I’m not going to print your menu. I have no need to save it for posterity. At no point, after the zombie apocolypse, when the interwebtubes are forever gone and your website is no longer available, will I find myself going “Well if only they had made their menu available in PDF form, I would order from the remaining zombie staff”. Every time I do a clean install, it’s assholes like you that make me endure a 35MB download and post-install reboot to see your fucking menu. It enrages me. I want to throw a small child into a wood chipper whenever I encounter this dreaded format.  PDF is the worst thing since AIDS. Please stop. Please.

I’m sure I’ll have more to bitch about soon, but this covers the high notes for today. Fix your shit, you lazy fucks.