At my climbing gym, there’s one song they play at the end of every night.
Gather up your jackets, move it to the exits. I hope you’ve found a friend.
What a nice message. Of course, they didn’t write the song, so we can’t give them credit along those lines, but they did select it. If you still can’t figure it out, the climbing gym’s closing time song is Semisonic’s Closing Time, an alt-rock hit I couldn’t get out of my head for the second half my time in grade 6 (translation for American readers: “6th grade”).
The closing time Closing Time song selection is pretty on the nose. I asked ChatGPT:
i want to play a song every night as i close my business, which will tell everyone that it's the end of the night. please give me 5 suggestions of songs i could play.
No prize money will be awarded to the person who correctly guesses the first song on the list.
“…This classic song is often used to signify the end of an event. Its lyrics directly reference closing time, making it an apt and direct choice.”
So they picked the most obvious tune imaginable, and did it in a time when all they had to rely on was their common sense and didn’t have ChatGPT to point them to this common sensical target. Why are we still talking about this? Because Closing Time offers a good lesson about how to cue guests for the next action they need to take. In this case, GTFO.
By 9:53 PM, straggling climbers are strewn across a 14,000 sq ft space that doesn’t have direct lines of sight. So they can’t hold up a giant “We’re Closed!” banner at the front desk. Management could have cast a slow-and-steady hell on their staff’s end of night, as they need to clean and do 20 other chores, asking them to wander through the gym hoping to find everyone and tell them to gather up their jackets and move it to the exits. That would include some awkward shouting at people 8 metres up a wall. No, that wouldn’t work.
They could take a page from bars around the world, who suddenly crank up the lights to send the same signal to their inebriated patrons. While some more aggressive methods may be required for bars, the handful of late-night climbers remaining don’t need to be hit with the blunt tool of cold, powerful light. I also don’t know how the climbing gym would use lights to send the signal, other than turning them off, and you can probably understand the problems that would pose for a person 8 metres up a wall.
(Which does point to another method, whose actual mechanism is instilling fear in climbers’ hearts, should they find themselves plunged into darkness, ensuring they leave before that happens.)
What the climbing gym has actually done is a simple stroke of genius. They’re using a method that sends the message across the entire space at once, doesn’t plunge climbers into sudden darkness like some biblical plague, and considering the audience, doesn’t have the risk of people not getting the message and just starting to sing along.
This is culture.
They’ve been sending the Semisonic signal for longer than I’ve been going there. Every single night. The song is friendly and, even though you might find yourself just hitting your stride at 9:57 PM, you haven’t been hit in the eyes with 8000 lumens of cold light. It’s hard not to oblige. Of course you also see a bunch of other people moving it to the exits, so you have to really be obtuse not to get the message, and if you have any sort of hearing impairment you’re able to get the benefit from seeing what others are doing.
The song they chose is obvious, but their decision to use a song this way isn’t. Like any form of good design, it seems incredibly obvious once you experience it, but how many places miss opportunities to make it as easy as having whatever university student is on duty just switch a song, and within ten minutes have a bunch of people filing out the door with smiles on their faces, wishing each other a good night?
And as a bonus, you might find yourself on your ride home with some quiet voice humming in the back of your mind, considering what they really mean when they say that every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. Yeah.