Air care and what a store smells like

Smell is the first thing a customer registers and the last thing most owners notice, because anybody who works in a building stops smelling it within a week. A store that smells of damp, of old mop water, of the bins or of stale food loses customers who never say why.

Air fresheners are the last step, not the first, and using them first is how a store ends up smelling of two things instead of one.

Where do store smells actually come from?

Four places, in rough order. Waste — bins, the back room, anything with food residue. Drains, especially floor drains and anything that dries out and lets sewer gas back. Cleaning residue, particularly mop heads and buckets left wet. And refrigeration, where a spill under a unit is out of sight and never cleaned.

Every one of those is a cleaning problem rather than an air problem, and every one is fixable in an afternoon once it is identified.

How do you find the source when you cannot smell it?

Ask somebody who does not work there. A supplier, a friend, a family member walking in cold will tell you in ten seconds what you have stopped noticing.

Then walk the store with your nose rather than your eyes, early in the morning before the doors have been open. The overnight air is the honest version.

What about drains?

A dry trap is the classic source of a sewer smell in a store, and it is common in floor drains that rarely see water. Pouring water down a little-used drain refills the trap and often fixes a smell nobody could locate.

Grease build-up in a drain near a food area is the other one, and that is a cleaning job rather than a water one.

What does mopping have to do with it?

A great deal. A mop head left wet in a bucket grows exactly what it smells like, and then that gets spread across the floor every night. Mop heads should be washed and dried, buckets emptied and rinsed, and both replaced periodically.

Stores that chase a floor smell with stronger chemicals are usually cleaning with the source of the problem.

Where do air fresheners belong?

After the cleaning, in small quantities, and not near food. A store with a genuine smell problem and a strong air freshener smells of both, and customers read that combination accurately.

Where they help is in restrooms and as a light background in an already clean store. Dispensers on a timer are more consistent than aerosols used when somebody remembers.

What about the products you sell?

Some sell smell as a category — candles, incense, air care, cleaning products — and they can dominate a small store if they are sited badly. Open-fragrance products near food or near the entrance change what the whole store smells like.

Site them away from food and away from the door, and check whether the section is leaking. Air care and health and beauty lines are worth placing deliberately for this reason alone.

What is the routine that keeps it right?

Bins emptied before they smell rather than when they are full, bins washed periodically rather than just relined, drains run weekly, mop equipment dried, spills cleaned under fixtures rather than around them, and a monthly walk-through by somebody with a working nose.

None of that costs anything beyond attention, which is the point. Cleaning supplies sit in store supplies.