Two Minor Rants

OK world, please excuse me while I get a couple of things off my chest.  I'm not normally one for ranting (really I'm not), but occasionally bad design and a lack of forethought drives me crazy.

Firstly, why are some large car parks at shopping centres and supermarkets divided into "zones" that are not numbered (or lettered) sequentially, but are instead designated into colours?  If I know that I'm parked in the "yellow zone", how does it help me to know that I'm currently walking through the "magenta zone"?  Sainsbury's seem to have taken an even more surreal twist on this, designating the zones in the car parks with pictures of fruit and vegetables.  What benefit does that offer anybody?  "Oh, look darling, we're in the strawberry zone and over there is the pineapple zone, so we can't be far from our parking space in the cucumber zone...".  Stupid.

Secondly - confectionery vending machines should *always* use alphanumeric codes to represent products.  Having customers instead enter two-digit integers is just asking for people to enter the price, isn't it?  Maybe I'm just particularly thick, but the last thing I think about as I'm buying a chocolate bar is the price, so if given the option of entering a two digits, that's what I'll key in, and invariably receive some random product that I really didn't want.  Actually I suspect that this is a cunning ploy by the manufacturers to offload some unpopular products that they can't shift, as the price of common products (Snickers, Mars) always seems to correspond to the product code for something bizarre and repulsive that people in need of a chocolate fix would never choose to buy.  Imagine the disappointment as I eagerly await my calorific feast, only instead to be dispensed a small packet of raisins or a carton of apple juice.  Hmmm, maybe it's all a cunning ploy to save the NHS some money...

</rant>