Overinvest in Your Toilets

When you walk into a restaurant or café, the front of house usually feels familiar — tables, lighting, staff. There’s only so much a proprietor can adjust out front to shape your opinion.

But step into the bathroom, and the real story often emerges. A restroom that’s dirty, broken, or simply tired, sends a signal that runs deeper than the décor: “we don’t care”. And if they don’t care here, you can’t help wondering what the kitchen looks like — or what that says about the food and the people behind it.

Now, find a spotless, well-designed bathroom, and your trust rises. You feel, almost instinctively, that this place is better run.

Case in point: I stopped at a big-name fast-food outlet on a recent drive. In the men’s room, only one stall worked; the rest were wrapped in black garbage bags. My takeaway? This brand has given up. So I went next door instead.

Every business has its version of the bathroom — a space customers rarely see as “core,” but where true standards show through. Maybe it’s how your phone system greets callers. The tone of your music. Or the AI voice you use to save a few minutes of staff time.

These are not trivial details. They are signals shaping how customers feel about your brand long before they consciously decide.

The danger is that purely logical, cost-cutting decisions can’t measure emotional impact. What feels like efficiency on a spreadsheet can quietly broadcast indifference in real life.

At CUBE, we help businesses turn those hidden touchpoints — sound, tone, flow, timing — into positive signals of care and competence. Because overinvesting in your “backrooms,” literal or digital, isn’t wasteful. It’s one of the smartest investments you can make in perception, trust, and long-term brand value.