12A – Figuring Out Buyer Behavior No. 1

I spoke to three different people about smokers at the bus stops this week. The first was just a lady at the stop with me, another was a father on the bus, and finally I spoke with a friend at the class I arrived to. They said that they just dropped their butts all around the bus stop and made a huge mess because there wasn’t a good place to dispose of them.

With the increase in anti-smoking initiatives ash trays have been disappearing around the city, the first lady I spoke with talked about how she just wanted a place to get rid of it without putting it in the trash. We went back and forth about where ashtrays went, and while we agreed it made smoking easier I thought about how people think that public ashtrays advertise smoking. I realized in that moment that in reality we were making the mess the smokers cause worse. I asked her where she would want to dispose of it if she could choose anything, and while she made it seem like she didn’t care I could tell that anything would be better than the current solution. On my bus, leaving her behind, I spoke with a father of two about his smoking habit. He said that he just tears the remainder of the cigarette up and scatters the ash and holds onto the filter until he gets home. Which was not what I was expecting to hear. Could some kind of person storage device work? When I asked him how he came with such a thing he just shrugged and got off the bus. I got to class a few minutes early and asked a friend who used to smoke what he did, and he just said he dumped it in the trash. Which seemed obvious, I guess I was too focused on the fact it might still be lit and cause problems. He said he didn’t care and he never set one on fire. At that time though he wasn’t really making many great decisions, so I wouldn’t call that a “solution”.

At the end of this journey I learnt about smokers that I never knew before. Their need to dispose of a cigarette vary widely, from just dropping them because an old solution is disappearing to just throwing them away with wild abandon. So, the “average” smoker each found their own way over time of solving their butt problem.