There's a gas station near my house that has a digital menu board behind the deli counter. Full-color screen. Professionally designed layout with photos and sections for burgers, breakfast, sides, the works. It looks great.
And on top of that screen, stuck right over the digital prices, are orange stickers from a price gun.
Somebody's Kielbasa went up. The burrito changed. And instead of updating the display, someone grabbed the same label gun they use on the chip bags and stuck new numbers directly onto the monitor.
I'd guess most people who walk up to that counter and notice the stickers have one of two reactions. Either they smile and think the deli guy got creative, or they don't think about it at all. It's a gas station. It's fine.
But I stood there for a minute. Because I wasn't looking at the sticker. I was looking at what broke.
What I Actually Saw
That screen exists because somebody spent real money solving a real problem. Printed menu boards are a pain to update. A digital display is supposed to make price changes instant. Someone sold the station owner on that idea, and they were right. It's a good idea.
So somewhere between "good idea" and "sticker on a monitor," something went wrong.
I can picture the owner. He probably told his guy behind the counter to update the price on the Kielbasa. And his guy did, the only way he could. Grabbed the price gun, stuck a label on the screen, moved on with his shift. No judgment there. He solved the problem in front of him with the tools available to him. That's what good employees do.
But the owner is probably groaning about it. He knows it looks wrong. He might even know it undermines the money he spent on the display. But what's he going to do? He's running a gas station. He doesn't have time to figure out why the screen can't be updated, and he might not know who to call even if he did.
That's the part I couldn't stop thinking about. Not the sticker. The gap between a tool that should work and the person who needs it to work.
Two Possible Breaks
Standing there, I could see two likely reasons that screen isn't getting updated the way it should.
The first is an access problem. Someone set up the display, maybe a vendor, maybe a previous employee. The credentials to the system walked out the door with them. The screen still runs, but nobody currently working there can log in to change anything. The tool is fine. The key is missing.
That's actually the easy version. An IT person resets the password, someone writes down the three steps to update a price, and the problem is solved permanently. One fix. A little documentation. Done.
The second possibility is harder, and I think it's the more likely one. That beautiful, professional menu layout is probably a graphic file. A designer built it in Photoshop or something similar, exported it as an image, and loaded it onto the screen. It looks great. But changing a single number means going back to the designer, waiting for a revision, getting the new file, and figuring out how to load it. It might take days. It definitely costs money every time.
If that's the case, the screen was never really a digital menu board. It's a backlit poster. The technology looked like it would make updates easy, but the way it was built guaranteed they'd be hard. The price gun isn't a failure of effort. It's the rational response to a tool that never actually did what the business needed.
What a Gas Station Menu Has to Do with Your Business
Every business has price guns on screens. They just don't look like stickers on a monitor.
They look like the front desk person who copies data from one system into another every morning because the two systems don't talk to each other. They look like the workaround your best employee built three years ago that everyone's afraid to touch. They look like the software you're paying for monthly that your team stopped using in favor of a spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet actually does what they need.
You've probably noticed these things. They bug you. You might even groan about them the way that gas station owner probably groans about the stickers. But you're busy running your business, and you're not sure what the fix looks like, or whether it's worth the hassle of finding out.
The difference between noticing and diagnosing is the difference between seeing a sticker on a screen and understanding what broke underneath it. Most people see the sticker. Someone with the right experience sees the system, traces it backward to the point of failure, and can tell you whether it's a five-minute fix or a tool that needs to be rethought entirely.
The Stickers in Your Operation
You know where they are. The things your team works around every day that you've stopped questioning because they've just become how things are done. Some of them are small. Some of them are costing you more than you think.
If a few of those came to mind while you were reading this, that's probably worth a conversation.