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Responding to the Call of the Mall
May 15, 2008
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Are your feet feeling restless? Your hands itchy? Or maybe your credit cards are sitting pretty in your wallet just waiting to be used. Perhaps you are responding to the Call of the Mall! This week, the Write Stuff takes you through the science of shopping with a retail anthropologist whose two books dissect that most sacrosanct of human activities in the modern world, shopping. Stay tuned with me, Loretta Foo.
By day, Paco Underhill is CEO of Envirosell, a research and consultant firm with offices scattered throughout the world. By night, he is the author of two enormously successful books that examine how and why we shop.
PU: I started writing books 10 years ago because I fell in love with the wrong woman. I fell in love with a woman who plays the flute for a living and it means that she works every night and every weekend, which meant that I had to come up with something to do during nights and weekends to stay out of trouble. Ergo, those two books. I had no idea as I started that the books would become as popular as they. ‘Why we buy: The Science of shopping’ is now out in 28 languages. The first book talks about the biological constants that govern how we move through spaces including stores. The second book is entitled, ‘Call of the Mall’. It is a dark, humorous walking tour of a shopping mall. It’s designed to make you giggle.
Is it popular among corporations - the people who actually sell the merchandise?
PU: I believe as a writer that I should write for a popular audience and that if I do that, I will get a business audience. As it stands now, many business writers write to show how smart they are and therefore, their books may sell well for a very short period of time and then they are pushed off the shelf by somebody else wanting to show how smart they are. Both of my books have sold well over time. ‘Why we buy: The Science of shopping’ was first published in 1999. Last year, it sold close to 100,000 copies which for a book that is almost 10 years old, is almost unthinkable in the world of business.
Why have these books become so popular that they span geographical boundaries and languages?
PU: I think the reason why the book is popular is because we like looking at ourselves and particularly, the first book gives you a way of looking at yourself as a human being moving through space in a way that you may not gave thought of before. For example, all across the world, 90% of us are right-handed so that we tend to carry things in our left hand and reach with our right hand, which means in general, most stores work better with a counter-clockwise circulation pattern. In general, men and women have very distinct differences that go back to our genetic code. Men are hunters. They want to walk into a store, kill something and drag it out reasonably quickly whereas women are gatherers, which is why two women can go to a shopping mall, spend an entire day, have a wonderful time and buy nothing.
How do certain shops for example, lingerie shops, appeal to women?
PU: In general, we live in a retail world that is owned by men, designed men, managed by men and yet, we expect women to shop in them. If I think about what makes a good dressing room for a female and a good dressing room for a man, there are discernable differences. If a man takes something into a dressing room, it fits, it is generally bought because men get no pleasure out of trying things on. But women do. It’s part of their genetic childhood code involved in fantasy and dress-up. Why is it for example, that the dressing rooms of so many lingerie stores don’t give women first an inner chamber to be able to change, an outer chamber that has some privacy so they actually get to look at themselves and then some form of outer parking lot to be able to put their husbands or boyfriends.
So that their husbands and boyfriends can critique their purchases?
PU: No. So that the husbands and boyfriends can get completely out of their hair. Men may like the idea of lingerie but the act of shopping for it is one that is absolutely painful.
Paco Underhill, author of ‘Why we buy: The Science of shopping’ and ‘The Call of the Mall’ which is available at major bookshops here. You’ve been listening to the Write Stuff with me, Loretta Foo.
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