A small innovation in the restaurant business, or where do you put the napkins?

I don’t know about others, but some of my friends and I have more than once run into the prob­lem of no ash­trays in non-smoking rooms. Let me explain why: there’s nowhere to throw used nap­kins, bits of paper and any other rubbish. In decent cafés the wait­ers do whisk dirty nap­kins off the table, of course, but I don’t find it all that pleasant. You feel like you’re being watched :)

I sug­gest solv­ing this prob­lem with spe­cial table­top trash bins. It could be a scaled-down copy of an ordi­nary trash can, with a lid that opens when you press a little pedal with your finger:

(Image lost: a pic­ture of such a bin, taken from a Kimberly-Clark prod­uct page.)

Why go to such lengths? Because if you just put out an ash­tray, people will think smok­ing is allowed after all, plus you can’t fit sev­eral nap­kins in an ash­tray: they’ll spill out, which isn’t pretty :)