What's your hidden population?

I spend a lot of time working in different parts of the city and often it's most efficient for me to just find a cafe to work in between meetings.


Time and again places claim to have wi-fi (McDonalds, Starbucks and many smaller cafes) but it is in name only, with the non-functional reality leaving me silently enraged or worse, wondering through the cafe balancing my open laptop trying to chase signal strength. 


I wonder, what would a place that offered guaranteed high speed wi-fi in every location achieve? And what is the size of the hidden population that suddenly would flock to these stores on a regular basis? According to IDC the mobile workforce was 29% of the population in 2008 and is estimated to reach 34.9% or 1.2bn by 2013. 


There are an increasing number of organisations servicing the mobile worker such as Roam, The Hub, select Regus locations. In the U.S. Chick-fil-a not only offers Wi-Fi but a few locations have turned their play areas into business meeting rooms in order to accommodate the increasing demand.


So, perhaps this isn't the most hidden population, but the point is - what percent of the available traffic for your store would come back again and again if you absolutely committed to meeting their needs, every time? 


You? Why not get ethnographic and watch the behaviour in your store or showroom, what can you see that people aren't saying? Look for behaviour of people making things fit their needs. Is it someone pulling out their own USB stick? Struggling to find a place to put their shopping? Students from the nearby university that check the menu and then keep walking? What's your hidden population?