A few years back, we had a cats. I had two cat doors, one from my mud room to my garage and from the garage to outside, so he could pretty much come and go.
At night he would come in around our bed time and for some reason would jump on the kitchen counter. There was nothing up there for them to eat but it bugged me when I would hear him jump off the counter back onto the floor, especially if he heard me get out of bed.
So I racked my brains on what I could do as a deterrent and I came up with this idea.
Knowing the cat could not see the kitchen counter surface from the floor, I bought about 10 mouse traps, loaded them and placed them on the kitchen counter. I then carefully placed a towel on top of the mousetraps.
That evening, as we lay in bed, I heard the cat flap down in the mud room, indicating the cat had come in. About 20 seconds later, all the mousetraps went off and I heard the cat land back on the floor and high tail it out of the cat door.
As soon as the cat left up and landed on the towel on the counter surface, the slight movement of the towel was enough to trigger the traps.
After that, he never jumped on the kitchen counter again.
We had another couple of pieces of furniture that the cat liked to jump up on. I repeated this same process and that cured him of that as well.