Selling me a product is really easy.

That’s not to say I’m a sucker consumer, it’s just that one feature is guaranteed to make me choose your item over a competitor’s.  The answer?  Insane legroom.

Last weekend I decided it was time to replace the desk chair I had been using since my sophomore year of college.  It served admirably — except the few…or many times I leaned back to far and fell over — but sometimes even good relationships must come to an end.

I went to Staples, which in addition to having 74,000 kinds of pens also has quite an array of chairs.  Fortunately, I quickly narrowed down the field to two candidates.  Unfortunately, they happened to be almost back-to-back, meaning I had quite a walk to shuttle between them during the all-important sit testing.

I really could have gone with either of them, but when I raised one to its highest level and sat down, I felt uncomfortably high.  As a six-foot-three-inch person, that’s quite a rare experience.  I bought the chair.

Buying my car in 2004 was a similar experience.  I climbed in for the test drive and reflexively slid the seat all the way back.  That’s what I had done in every car I had driven before that day, usually leaving me to just deal with getting as close to comfortable as I could get.

But in this case, it was too far.  It was the first time I felt like I couldn’t reach the pedals.

Perhaps this advice to manufacturers is limited to certain products, but if someone* makes a soda with amazing leg room, I’ll definitely buy it.

*These people would be Pepsi, since Pepsi is amazing.