Automatic Doors that Won't Open Automatically

It's a sticky thing.  Sometimes the automatic door at my post office isn't automatic. That is, you have to actually push the door open.

Strange thing is that people will often stand in front of the door, waiting for it to open.  They don't bother to try pushing it.  One time the person in front of me actually backed away from the door and allowed me to push it open.  Today, the person backed up and tried to walk towards the door again. Maybe this time it would open for them.

Why not just push it open?  Why hesitate, wait, or back away? What's up with that?

Maybe there could be a business idea here.

It's all about how you use technology

"The economic benefits arise not from innovation itself, but from the entrepreneurs who eventually discover ways to put innovations to practical use - and most critically, as economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt have pointed out, from the organizational changes through which businesses reshape themselves to take advantage of the new technology."

Quote from
The Box, by Marc Levinson, Copyright 2006, page 13.

I never knew I was interested in business...

Not in high school, nor college.  It was only after being out of college for a couple of years, and finding some success with selling on ebay, that I became interested in marketing.

Somewhere around the same time period, I realized that business news is interesting to me. More interesting than to the average person.

I read a couple of books about economics, which I really enjoyed and now I am on a roll to learn as much as possible.  And not just about business and economics and marketing, but I also want to learn more history.  It seems like in school I learned only, maybe 0.00001% of all of the history there is to learn and this is a disappointment to me, because history is so interlinked with our present time.

I like to spot trends and discover how human nature and business cycles and politics and everything else works.  I'll try to document a bit of my learning process here.

Picture credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwheeleroz/3406931272/