Be careful what you wish for.

Most Beacon Hill, North End and West End residents were eager for Whole Foods to come on the scene. The vegetables are 100 percent better than the unidentifiable floppy objects the erstwhile Stop & Shop used to offer. If there were going to be any problems caused to other businesses by Whole Foods, we were afraid it would be for J. Pace’s, Savenor’s, DeLuca’s and the North End’s small markets.

It turns out, however, that while those establishments may have suffered a decline in business, they are still viable.

Those hurt most by Whole Foods turn out to be Cambridge Street restaurants. Eli Nakhoul, whose family owns Phoenicia, says that Whole Foods’s tempting take-out bazaar and catering business has hurt every restaurant along the street. That’s not good for those of us who like Phoenicia’s distinctive offerings.

Cambridge Street restaurants have been doubly hit by another unintentional whammy.  When Massachusetts state law required doctors to forego freebies from drug companies, their lunch-time customers declined. Never mind that it would be a pitiful doctor who would be able to be bought for the price of a Phoenicia restaurant lunch, but there it is.

The bottle bill was another good idea that created a new problem for downtown Boston residents. It’s a big mess for us and trash pickers open the bags and spill them as they search for returnables. Now there is legislation in committee that would extend the bill to include water and other beverage bottles that currently are recylable, but not returnable.

Will this just mean more mess in downtown Boston?

Another question for downtown Boston’s small shops, with precious little storage space now, is where will they store the extra returnables before the truck comes to collect them

The legislation’s chief sponsor, State Representative Alice Wolf, allowed for some leeway in that it would apply only to businesses with more than 12 employees. The bill would reduce the amount of trash municipalities have to deal with and it would generate more revenue for the state in terms of unclaimed deposits, so it is good for the commonwealth as a whole.

But it is a good example of how trying to do good sometimes backfires, especially for downtown Boston residents.

Finally, more than 40 years after the Surgeon General declared that smoking was hazardous to health, we’ve pretty much eliminated smoke from the inside of airplanes, restaurants, offices and public buildings.

The only problem is that now, with all the smokers banished to the outdoors, it’s hard to walk down the street or enter any downtown office building without having to thread your way through clouds of smoke. Try the corner in front of Harvard Gardens as dusk falls or Hanover Street in the North End or sections of Newbury Street, if you want to get the full effect.

And the cigarette butts get stuck in the bricks. They are hard to sweep up. How did it come to this?

State Representative Ted Speliotis has noticed the problem and put forth House bill 2162, which would forbid smoking within 25 feet of any doorway, window or other opening at a place where smoking is forbidden inside. It’s unclear what the bill’s chances are since it is still in committee.

People are not clairvoyant, and often their predictions of how good or bad something will be are simply wrong. Moreover, it is unlikely that we’d wish Whole Foods wasn’t there, or that bottles still lined our roadways or that smokers could still puff away inside at a desk next to us.

Nevertheless it pays before you wish for something to consider what the consequences could be.