I started trying to collect a complete set of them. Apparently every public space washes its floor every night, and they have to put one of these up for 24 hours after the floor's been wet, so at your local shopping mall or supermarket there's guaranteed to be at least one of these things sitting there making you walk around it. While I was collecting these, for the first week or two I grew cognizant of their ubiquity. Usually they're fluorescent orange, although they also come in red, pink, yellow, and white. These have been around for a few decades, are cheap to make, and most importantly, in recent days they have been proliferating like bacteria in a McDonalds restroom.
Orange cones are the typographical dingbat of public spaces.
Of course, people had lots of fun running over the flimsy soft plastic cheap cone things. So construction crews would put up real barricades. And then put the wimpy little orange cones in front of the real barricades. In highway construction contexts, orange cones have largely been replaced by orange barrels, which are bigger and presumably more intimidating to cars. I mean, there's not a strip mall parking lot that doesn't have cones.