Money magazine (August 2008) shows how Swedish furniture merchandiser IKEA leads people around to expose them to things they never intended to shop for. “The challenge is getting out with only what you went in for,” Money says. Toys R Us and Aldi do more or less the same thing, on a much less scientific plan, but still, you enter a chute and you go from point to point as the store layout directs you, sort of like cattle entering the processing plant. These merchandising approaches are not so sinister as all that — you won't be butchered. But you will be processed. Nothing personal, mind you — just business.

Inspiration from elsewhere, however, can go either way: either you see something to emulate, or something to avoid. The IKEA scheme suggests both.

On the one hand, imagine all the little stuff you could rent or sell on impulse, not to mention the actual service to the customer who forgot this or that and you can save him or her the nuisance of making a special trip. So that's a good thing.

On the other hand, imagine a contractor, double-parked and dirty, who dashes in for a breaker or a bit and has to weave his way past the rest of your inventory just to get the thing done and get back to work. Need I say it? — whatever impedes the customer instead of helping is a bad thing.

People have made whole careers out of store design and display strategies, and these approaches can be enormously valuable, but they must be industry-specific, and even more tightly focused than that: they must be market-specific. If you're all contractor rental, it's a very different game from DIY tools. Everybody knows the difference between monthly accounts and cash customers — the inventory issues, the accounting, the time you have to spend with a customer, the returns, and more. But how many actually look at their store design, their walk-in traffic patterns, with that same distinction in mind?

Making it easy for the contractor and making it easy for the DIYer both have the same purpose, but the methods may be just about the opposite. The contractor who comes in for the breaker and bits needs to find anything that applies directly to breaking concrete with that particular breaker close at hand and available to grab in a jiffy — in, get, go.