A buddy of mine similarly did digital signage for a mall in central Japan. The most important sign just aggregated Twitter accounts controlled by employees of t

A buddy of mine similarly did digital signage for a mall in central Japan. The most important sign just aggregated Twitter accounts controlled by employees of the retail shops. By far the most successful emergent behavior: "Do you cut hair for a living? Do you not have someone's hair to cut in next 30 minutes? Tweet that the next person to walk in gets 10% off their haircut and it will show up on a sign that a hundred people pass every five minutes." (I suspect that many people who cut hair in Japan do so on the US model, where they are independent contractors of the shop who "rent a chair" as opposed to salaried employees. It is to their direct advantage to maximize throughput, in a way that it is not to the direct advantage of e.g. someone who works at McDonalds to maximize sales of burgers.)