Suggestions

Thanks to Seth Brown (who suggested it), we now have a Suggestion Box at the front desk. We have received a good pile of suggestions in the few days it's been available, and I wanted to go through some of what we have heard, and tell you what we'll do about it.

The suggestions we have received so far fall into a few categories:

• routesetting
• facility
• policies
• silly comments (mostly from our own staff)
  
• other

I'm not going to exhaustively review every suggestion, and I won't promise to act on every one, but we will read and consider everything that comes in. Here are the ones I've chosen to respond to for starters:

Please do not put pink tape close by orange (hard to recognize holds)
We realize that some of the tape combinations (another is white tape on the light-coloured walls) can be hard to deal with, and we will be more careful about that.

Horizontal routes along bouldering walls
This is definitely coming. We do plan to backfill both the bouldering walls and the bottom part of the roped walls to provide more traverses (eventually very long ones!), but we need more holds before we can do this. The good news is that I have now given Dustin a monthly budget to buy more holds, and over time as our inventory grows, we'll have more available to do this.

The "no shirt" rule sucks.
I'm not sure if this came from a guy who wants to take his shirt off, or a woman who wants to see guys with their shirts off. We adopted the policy of requiring shirts to try to establish a family-friendly atmosphere. I felt that shirtless/sweaty guys would make the place feel more hard-core, and could intimidate many of the customers I want to feel comfortable here. I still feel that way. The place is air conditioned, so temperature should not be a reason to need to take your shirt off. I'll keep listening to feedback, but for now I'm keeping the policy in place.

Play iPods
This is a reasonable request, but one I cannot adopt. As a business I need to obey the law, and that means making sure that artists are properly compensated for music that is played in my place of business. The only way I know to do that is by paying for a music service that takes care of paying the appropriate licensing fees. Perhaps because of my background in the software industry, I am very aware of the issues regarding illegal use of software and music, and I'm being careful to do things the right way.

double back by Christma$
I have no idea what this suggestion means. If the person who submitted it will explain more about what they are requesting, I'll listen.

Thanks for all the suggestions!