Since that event, which happened a few years back, women’s underwear styles have come to resemble men’s, with their wide, flat (nonconstricting) elastic and soft cotton fabrics, thereby solving our woman’s particular problem and keeping her out of her husband’s drawers.
As of 2008, Victoria’s Secret still sells the pink frilly stuff, but relative newcomer Gap Body carries the more athletic and comfortable stuff, or what some in the industry cynically call the butch lines. What we’re still missing, however, is a powerhouse merchant who’s willing to focus on the needs of the mature woman.
On the other side of the fence is an interesting boom in what’s called male lingerie. It used to be boxers or briefs. Now any self-respecting underwear section has at least three more styles—boxer-briefs, slips (or the male version of a bikini) and midrise (which sit a couple of inches higher than a bikini). In my dotage I am still your basic briefs guy, but back to our story.
Shoppers make the ultimate determination of how they use the retail environment and the products that are sold in it. Product designers, manufacturers, packagers, architects, merchandisers and retailers make all the big decisions about what people will buy and where and how they will buy it. But then the shoppers themselves enter the equation and turn nice, neat theories and game plans into confetti.
In this particular case, was the general unsuitability of most underwear for ladies of size known to the designers and makers of said garments? Maybe not. Maybe they knew it but didn’t know what to do with that information. Maybe they assumed that women wouldn’t wear briefs that looked like men’s underwear, although, clearly, the general drift in women’s clothes has been toward a more masculine ideal. If some underwear executive had been standing in that aisle next to our researcher, maybe he would have realized that this woman was teaching him something extremely important about his own product. Perhaps the revolution in women’s underwear would have started earlier than it did.
Then again, maybe not.
Here’s another example of shoppers forcing the retail environment to bend to their will. It involves what is perhaps the major issue in the design and furnishing of public spaces: seating.
I love seatin g. I could talk about it all day. If you’re discussing anything having to do with the needs of human beings, you have to address seating. Air, food, water, shelter, seating—in that order. Before money. Before love. Seating.
In the majority of stores throughout the world, sales would instantly be increased by the addition of one chair. I would remove a display if it meant creating space for a chair. I’d rip out a fixture. I’d kill a mannequin. A chair says: We care.
Given the chance, people will buy from people who care.
This happened in a large, well-known women’s lingerie store. One that was providing insufficient seating for the men who wait for the ladies who shop. How do we know it was insufficient? Because the husbands and boyfriends were led to improvise, which human beings will always do when a need is going unmet. Whenever you encounter shopper improvisation in the retail environment, you have found poignant evidence of one person’s failure to understand what another person requires.
If I may digress for a good illustration: In the casino-hotels of Atlantic City, where kindness is, shall we say, not excessively idealized, you see lots of people who have wagered and lost but must linger until their tour buses depart. The casinos, for obvious reasons, wish these people would wait in the gaming area, parked in front of a slot machine or a dealer. To encourage that, there are no chairs in the hotel lobbies. How do the visitors respond? They sit glumly on the floors, dozens and dozens of sour-faced losers in a row, not a sight that evokes the opulent gaming ambience of Monte Carlo for the incoming suckers. These people need chairs!
In lingerie stores, too, the need is plain. While women shop, men wait, and when men (or women) wait, they prefer to sit. Is any truth truer? Is any nose on any face plainer than that fact? Still, designers of commercial spaces screw up royally when it comes to seating. In my days as a scholar of parks and plazas with the Project for Public Spaces, we spent a great deal of our time thinking about how to improve outdoor benches—where they should go, how wide they should be, whether they should be in shade or sunlight, how close they should be to the main thoroughfares, whether they should be wood or stone (stone gets awfully chilly in winter). A bench, we realized, might actually double the distance an older pedestrian could cover—someone might walk a while, tire slightly, and consider turning back, but then there’d be an inviting bench in the shade. Once restored, the pedestrian would continue forth. In the retail environment, a chair’s main purpose is slightly different: When people go shopping in twos or threes, with spouses or children or friends along for the trip, seating is what keeps the nonshopping party comfortable and contented and cared for and off the shopper’s back.
In that lingerie store, the womenfolk were shopping but the menfolk were not—they were waiting for the womenfolk. They’d have loved a place to sit, but this store chose not to provide it. Why not? Maybe there wasn’t enough space for chairs. Maybe there was a chair and it broke. Maybe somebody decided that a bunch of guys hanging around would spoil the decor.
Did that mean the men would stand, or lean? Of course not—it meant they’d invent seating. In this case, they gravitated toward a large window that had a broad sill at roughly the height where a bench would be. And the sill became a bench.
And where exactly was this ad-hoc bench? Through no one’s fault or design, it was immediately adjacent to a large and attractive display of the Wonderbra, the architectural marvel that gave life such a lift. It seems easy in hindsight to predict what happened next: Women approached the display, began to study the goods, and then noticed that they were being studied by the guys on the windowsill. On the day we visited the store, there were two elderly gents loitering there, unabashedly discussing the need for Wonderbras of every woman who was brave enough to stop and shop.
Did I mention that no Wonderbra was purchased while those two codgers sat there?
Now, everyone knows that adjacencies are of huge importance to every product, especially something like the Wonderbra, which requires a little examination and consideration and then a try-on. Great retail minds churn themselves into mush trying to unravel the mysteries of which products should be sold near one another for maximum spark and synergy. And here, completely without intention, a very bad adjacency was created (bad for the shoppers, bad for the store, not so bad for the guys) by human beings who were forced by a retailer to improvise.
We’ve tried to organize the seating idea by calling it short-, medium-and long-term parking. Short-term parking is outside a dressing room. It’s designed for the bored wallet carrier, surrogate security guard or two-legged dog to be parked for three minutes. Medium-term parking is the chair at the doorway or bench immediately outside the door, where the guy, the guard and the dog can be left for ten minutes. Ideally, medium-term parking is designed as a perch for people-watching, not too close, though, so that muttered comments can’t be overheard. We find long-term parking in a shopping mall. It’s quiet and restful. Sometimes it has a whiff of Zen to it—the noise of falling water or a fountain. It is a comfortable place to be for twenty minutes or longer, whether that’s to read a newspaper, fiddle with a BlackBerry or feed a child.
Here’s another instance where shoppers rightly confounded the narrow-minded agenda of retailers.
There’s an ongoing struggle afoot between the makers of cosmetics and the users. Women want to try on certain cosmetics, lipstick especially, before buying, which is understandable considering how expensive makeup is and how it differs in appearance depending on the skin of the wearer. Cosmetics makers, on the other hand, wish that women would not sample their products quite so liberally, since even slightly used lipsticks are rarely purchased. There are many plans and systems that provide testers to shoppers, but none of these has been so flawlessly successful that it has become the industry standard. And s
o the game goes on.
Some years ago, a makeup maker thought it had devised a foolproof lipstick—one that couldn’t be twisted open without breaking a tape seal. This, the maker thought, would allow women to peer into the tube to see the color but not actually touch the lipstick itself. The boys in packaging were certain that this was going to save the company millions. We were hired to observe how women interacted with the prototype. We watched shoppers remove the cap, look inside, and unsuccessfully attempt to twist it open—at which point they lowered their pinky fingernails into the tube and gouged out a dab to have a look. The experts were foiled again. Their mistake was in even trying to stop women from testing lipstick. The more progressive cosmetics makers recognize that testing leads to buying, and so they encourage it by making it possible without turning women into outlaws. To my mind, the best solution would be one that came with a profit motive—simply package small samples of each season’s new colors of lipstick, blush and face powder, enough for two or three applications of each, and charge a dollar or two.
In Japan in 2002, I found that exact idea outside Shibuya Station in Tokyo. The store is called Three-Minute Happiness. The sign reads miscellaneous goods that make our life happy and easy. Could anything be simpler? Just three minutes—that’s all it takes. A fleeting, serene shopping experience. Even better, it leaves you feeling happy, just as advertised. The store sells samples—of lipstick, nail polish, other beauty products and a few household items—and is organized by price: one hundred yen, two hundred yen, three hundred yen, roughly translating into one dollar, two dollars, three dollars. Off to the side is a coffee and ice cream bar where you put your money into a vending machine with a picture menu board, and out spits a coupon that you then present to the server who makes your coffee or scoops your ice cream—no fumbling with cash. I call it a three-minute retail vacation.
Not every form of improvisation requires remediation. In the heyday of the video retail boom before Netflix (remember the dark ages?), many American families made the weekend pilgrimage to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video mostly in search of new-release movies. The video-rental business made pennies on renting the latest releases but scored big time when it could get you to rent the old stuff—classics like North by Northwest or The Great Escape. Their ongoing dilemma was how to get what they called “basic inventory” out the door.
We noticed that quite a few of the truly expert searchers among their clientele headed not for the new releases section but for the returns cart, the trolley where incoming videos go before they are filed. There’s no reason to attempt to alter that behavior—it actually saves some clerk a little labor, which is a good thing. We suggested spiking that return cart with a few classic films, particularly ones that had some connection to a new release. It worked.
Here’s a final example of customers using stores in ways other than those intended, this time to the complete benefit of the business. More than half of all fast food in the United States is purchased at the drive-thru window, and we (along with everyone else) assumed that those diners either ate as they drove off or took the food back to their offices or elsewhere and downed it there. During a series of recent studies, though, we noticed something odd: Around 10 or more percent of drive-thru customers would get their food and then park right there in the lot and eat in their cars. Curiously, the drivers who did this tended to be in newer cars than the restaurants’ average customers. Were they elitist burger-lovers who were simply embarrassed to be seen in a humble grease pit? Or did they enjoy the luxury of eating in an environment where they could talk freely on their cell phones, listen to their own music, and sit in their own seats? Either way, it’s a segment of fast-food diners that’s worth accommodating—after all, these customers bring their own chairs and clean up after themselves. As a result, we now advise fast-food restaurants to make sure their parking lots are visible from the street, so that drivers can see that there’s space for them. We also emphasize the importance of maintaining pleasant conditions—shade, with a view of something other than the Dumpster—for cars as well as people. (In one restaurant we studied, all the best parking spots were taken by employees, whose cars would remain in place for eight hours at a pop, a very dumb practice.) Finally, our finding affirms the overall trend among fast-food restaurants to shrink the size of the building and increase the size of the drive-thru and the parking lot, thereby allowing customers to have it their way—which, in nearly every case, is as it should be.
A final note: What I don’t understand is why the fast-food business has not invented and provided a car bib. Something that allows you to eat that burger without spilling pickles and ketchup on that new tie of yours or dropping that stray french fry in between the seats. Something for one of those business-school guys to ponder.
III
Men Are from Home Depot, Women Are from Bloomingdale’s: The Demographics of Shopping
As we’ve seen, the simplest aspects of humanity—our physical abilities and limitations—have quite a bit of say in how we shop. But nothing as interesting as shopping is ever quite so simple. We all move through the same environments, but no two of us respond to them exactly alike. This sign may be tastefully rendered, perfectly legible, exquisitely positioned, but you read the sign and I do not. The store flows beautifully, and all the merchandise is easily within my grasp, except that I hate buying clothing and would rather be fishing. No shopping baskets were ever more conveniently located, only you’re strapped for cash right now, or you’re just constitutionally incapable of buying more than two books at a time.
Certainly we’re all aware of how shopping means different things to different people at different times. We use shopping as therapy, reward, bribery, pastime, an excuse to get out of the house, a way to troll for potential loved ones, entertainment, a form of education or even worship, a way to kill time. There are compulsive shoppers doing serious damage to their bank accounts and credit ratings who use shopping as a cry for help. (Then they shop around for twelve-step programs.) And how many disreputable public figures end up arrested for shoplifting small, inexpensive items? It seems we get two or three a year, always in Florida.
In the ’80s, Eastern European émigrés who came to America were awestruck by the abundance on display in a typical suburban supermarket. The stores symbolized how free-market democracy comes down to simple freedom of choice—lots and lots of choices. It was in a supermarket that I, too, had an emotionally cathartic shopping experience. This was maybe twenty years ago, a time when it began to seem as though Envirosell might succeed as an ongoing concern. Up until that point, though, it was an open question—I was borderline broke all the time, working like a dog but plowing every nickel I had back into the company. Things were tight: If I had a meeting in Florida, for instance, I would take the last flight of the day down there to get the cheapest ticket, arriving in the middle of the night. Then I’d pick up my cheap rental car, drive to my destination, curl up my six-foot-four-inch frame as best I could, doze lightly in the car, shave and brush my teeth in a gas station bathroom, and go to my appointment trying my best to impersonate a successful research firm founder. Tight. Anyway, on the day in question it became clear that I and my company were going to be all right. And on that day I just happened to visit the Pathmark supermarket near South Street Seaport in New York. Standing in the imported goods aisle, it suddenly hit me that I could afford to buy anything there I wanted. If, say, I wished to try some of the English ginger preserves I remembered from my youth, I could just pick up a jar and pay for it, heedless of the fact that it cost maybe four or five bucks. No more cheap Welch’s grape jelly. At age thirty-five, I no longer had to sweat over my food budget, I realized, and at that moment, I—a six-foot-four, 220-pound, bald, bearded guy—began to cry. Right there in front of all those imported jellies, jams and preserves, I wept with relief and happiness, emotions that had come forth thanks to a supermarket. From that day on, my breakfast of choice at least 150 mornings a year consisted of obscenely expe
nsive ginger preserves and organic peanut butter spread on an English muffin and downed with a cup of strong coffee.
But doesn’t everybody cry in supermarkets? Much of our work at Envirosell has to do with identifying differences in shoppers, trying to come up with types and generalizations that might be useful to the retailers and others who control our shopping spaces. Not surprisingly, in a world where “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” is a commonplace, we pay close attention to how men and women behave differently in stores. Some of the distinctions are what you’d expect—women are better at it, men are loose cannons. But as men and women (and relations between them) change, their shopping behaviors do, too, which will have huge implications for American business.
The other great distinction we study has to do with the age of the shopper. Once upon a time, children in stores were seen but not heard. Those days are long gone, and now even the smallest among them must be considered and accommodated in the retail equation. At the other extreme, older shoppers are also more important than ever, if only because there are more of them, and they have a lot of money to spend and time to spend it. Their presence will transform how products are sold in the twenty-first century. Enormous cultural and demographic shifts are coming into play; in the four chapters that follow, we’ll see how shoppers differ, and how those differences are reflected in the world of shopping.
EIGHT
Shop Like a Man
Men and women differ in just about every other way, so why shouldn’t they shop differently, too? The conventional wisdom on male shoppers is that they don’t especially like to do it, which is why they don’t do much of it. It’s a struggle just to get them to be patient company for a woman while she shops. As a result, the entire shopping experience—from packaging design to advertising to merchandising to store design and fixturing—is geared toward the female shopper.
Why We Buy Page 11