I was at the store recently to fix something in the POS system.
While I was there, I noticed one of the team members walk over, pick up their phone that was plugged in and charging near the device that controls the store's music, make a comment about the song, and switch the station. Whatever was playing before, gone. What came on next was their preference. Their genre. Their mood.
I watched for several minutes. The team member was into it. Head bobbing a little while they worked. The clients in the store didn't react. They weren't vibing. They were doing their laundry in whatever audio environment someone else had chosen for them in a split second.
That was one visit.
On a separate occasion, I walked in and the music seemed loud to me. Not blaring, but louder than it normally is. A couple of the team members were moving to it. They looked like they were enjoying their shift. The clients, again, just existed in it. Then at another time, a client mentioned to the manager that the music had been too loud. They didn't leave a review. They didn't make a scene. They said it in passing to the manager.
Three different visits. Three different observations. The same pattern.
Nobody was designing the client experience in that store. It was being shaped, day by day, shift by shift, by whoever had access to the controls.
The Invisible Revenue Lever
Here's where this gets interesting and blew my mind. There's a body of research, decades of it, on what happens when the atmosphere of a business is deliberately designed versus left to whoever has access to the remote, the thermostat, or the playlist.