As professional observers, we play a strange role in the world of commerce. I joke that I’m the only person in the retailing industry who’s delighted to witness shoplifting. It shows that we’re able to confound the Heisenberg principle and observe people in stores without altering their behavior. After all, if someone shoplifts in front of a team of trackers, it means that person hasn’t noticed we’re there (on the rare occasions we get busted, usually it’s by some sharp-eyed kid). Some of my most vivid memories, in fact, involve thievery. I remember studying the video of a well-dressed matron at the fragrance counter of Filene’s Basement on Washington Street in Boston. She repeatedly dispatched the respectful clerk on missions to distant parts of the section while she loaded up her tote bag with bottles of perfume from the counter. Actually, we commonly see well-dressed shoplifters buy one product, then steal another. At a drugstore in Spartanburg, South Carolina, our trackers kept finding individual disposable diapers (clean ones) tucked into odd corners of the store. The mystery was cleared up when they saw a shopper filling a half-empty diaper package with large jars of a pricey headache remedy. Our most pathetic shoplift sighting involved a father who tucked a screwdriver set into his sleeping infant’s diaper.
But our job is like that of the crew on Star Trek—we’re there to observe and report but not interfere.
We preserve the privacy of those we videotape, as a way of keeping faith with our ultimate patron, the shopping public. Given that my roots as a researcher are based in public advocacy, I am very sensitive to questions of invasion of privacy in our work. I was appalled when one of the first major magazine stories on Envirosell called us “supermarket spies.” A few years back, BBC radio invited me to appear on an hour-long call-in talk show. Glad to participate, I said. But when I called in, I was surprised to find they’d set up a small ambush of sorts. The other guest? An expert in consumer advocacy. The topic? Privacy.
Now, whatever you do, don’t slap the George Orwell 1984 thing on me. If you believe Envirosell’s store cameras are intruding on people’s privacy, then let’s first take a stroll through the streets of London, and we’ll find our faces showing up on just a few of the city’s roughly five hundred thousand closed-circuit cameras, many of which are hooked up to facial recognition software—just a small portion of the seven million cameras softly clicking away all across the U.K.
If London is outside your reach, we can log on to the web instead. In ten minutes, I can find out how much money you make, your political party affiliation, what books you’ve taken out of the public library, what your arrest record is, if any, and the names and phone numbers of your neighbors. Heck, I can Google-map your house from a satellite and see if there’s smoke coming out of your chimney.
Our cameras are hooked up to a supermarket, department store or bank. I’m not interested in who you are, what your name is, what your phone number is, where you live or whether you own a golden retriever or a guppy or a hive of bees. All I’m interested in is shopping patterns. To me, you’re Shopper #X3. You’re wearing worn jeans, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame T-shirt and a well-broken-in pair of boat shoes.
And that’s it.
Some colleagues have suggested that by writing this book I run the risk of giving up all our secrets—that a company could read these lessons and skip hiring us. But this book is only a start in a certain direction. A business that pays attention to its customers probably already practices many of the things I discuss in this book. It’s always more satisfying for us to work with companies that are headed in the right direction. Our clients invariably have two observations about the findings we present. The first is that our research seems to confirm what common sense already tells us about how people shop, that once we deliver our report the lightbulb snaps on and you realize that gosh, of course you knew (somewhere, in the back of your mind) that a shopper holding a coat and a handbag is not going to be able to select as much merchandise as one whose hands are free. It even strikes us as incredibly simple—once we’ve spent a few days actually observing shoppers and counting how many things they buy and then comparing that by hands-free and hands-full. In other words, once we’ve proven it scientifically, it suddenly seems as though you knew it all along, which is a good sign, I think. Science is supposed to make sense. Until then, however, all the common sense in the world didn’t induce many retailers to improve the way they provided shoppers with baskets. This issue is still stupendously mis-handled by most stores, even those owned by highly sophisticated retail behemoths.
The other common observation is that many of the recommendations we make are more like fine-tuning than dramatic renovation—but when you implement a dozen little changes throughout a store, you sometimes find you’ve improved an awful lot. As I like to say, in a world where marketing focuses on strategy, tactics are being ignored.
For example, I mentioned in Chapter 1 that older women were being ill-served by drugstore cosmetics sections, where less-than-glamorous products such as concealer cream were stocked down near the floor, literally forcing shoppers to their knees. In fact, we had collected some video showing older shoppers crawling in order to browse the category—images that were truly poignant, I think, and ultimately effective. While some cosmetics planograms have been changed to accommodate the mature shopper, I have footage shot in 2005 that is virtually identical to clips from twelve years earlier—the older woman struggling to get down on her knees to find her product. Yes, moving the products two feet higher has made a big difference in consumer comfort and sales. Yet even now we see the same mistakes happening over and over.
A decade or so ago, we were hired to study how people shop for flowers at a supermarket in Australia. Sales in the department were much lower than anticipated until we saw why: The method of display—large plastic vats holding many flowers—was mystifying to shoppers. No one could figure out how much the flowers cost or whether they were sold by the bunch or the blossom. And masses of blossoms in large vats gave shoppers no sense of what the flowers would look like once they got them home. In other words, the simplest matters had not been sufficiently thought out. The display was especially forbidding to the occasional flower buyer, which is most of us. A few small changes were made—individual bunches were displayed in front of the large vats, prices were more clearly marked—and suddenly flowers were flying out of the store.
The fact that a minor alteration can bring a large improvement should come as no surprise. After all, science is by and large the study of very small differences. Sometimes critical truths are discovered in this way. Charles Darwin went about measuring the length of birds’ bills, which is pretty small work even by our standards. But from his studies came a fundamental shift in our theories about living things and why they thrive or fail. Darwin’s main finding sounds like common sense, too—the idea that successful organisms are the ones that best adapt to their environment. In stores something similar happens, except that it’s the environment that must adapt to the organism.
All this is a little high-minded for a world as workaday as retailing. But stores and shopping have never been one-dimensional. Going back even to the dawn of shopping, to the days of rudimentary barter or the open-air marketplace, there has been, for example, a social aspect to shopping that has nothing to do with buying and selling. Shopping is an activity that brings people together. When women were slaves to household work, it got them out of the house. In more primitive times shopping was an occasion for people to gather and do the things they do in groups, like talk and exchange news and gossip and opinions. Shopping still serves that purpose. Today, when people work at jobs that require them to be out of the home and in the company of other people, perhaps there is less of a social kick in shopping. But as we wander through the store or the mall, examining goods, we are permitted to more or less openly examine each other, people-watching being a supremely satisfying pastime, whether in the Middle Ages or today.
Shopping is a form of entertainment, just like the movies or the zoo. T
he trend today only emphasizes that function. Williams-Sonoma, Whole Foods, or Selfridges in London—these retail sites raise the bar every day. Once upon a time, only Woolworth’s and the local drugstore brought shopping and eating together under the same roof. Now, within minutes of my office, I can go from a bookstore with a coffee bar to a home furnishings store to a clothing store with a lunch counter to a bank where there is an urn of hot coffee (gratis) for customers. When you visit the Hard Rock Café, the Harley-Davidson Café, or a Cracker Barrel off the interstate, it’s difficult to decide whether you’re in a restaurant with a gift shop or a store with food. The distinction no longer even matters—selling (and therefore shopping) is taking place.
Great public repositories of culture and learning, museums and opera houses and zoos, were established by the fortunes of virtuous, civic-minded tycoons of an earlier age. As the tycoons died off, these institutions kept afloat on contributions from virtuous, civic-minded corporations. Today, most museums have discovered that there is a dependable stream of independent income to be had by going retail—that is, by creating opportunities for serious shopping, stores that offer everything from pencils for a quarter to jewelry, art and artifacts selling for thousands of dollars. Now the shoppers get to feel virtuous and civic-minded, knowing that their spending supports such worthy endeavors. Still, this is simply more retailing going on, and of an innovative nature. (Cannily, museums usually locate their shops by the front door, so that one may go in and buy without having to pay an entrance fee or actually confront an exhibit.) Museum shopping has become so popular among well-educated, cultured customers that we now see businesses like the Museum Store—in essence, museum stores without the museum.
At some level we treat stores as though they are museums—places to learn about what interests us, whether it’s the latest manifestation of high fashion, or innovations in computer software, or the state of the art in automobile carburetors, or what’s new in crime novels. To many, the arrival of the spring couture collections at Saks is akin to the opening of a new blockbuster exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Ten years ago, when the first edition of this book came out, I met with the CFO of Lincoln Center (our old client from Time, Inc.), who had uncovered from some dusty file the report I generated more than twenty-five years ago, the one referenced earlier in this book, about managing traffic flow and retail at his cultural complex. His point was, “We’re ready now.” Consider the store design trend that has forsaken distant merchandise behind glass in favor of “open” displays—tables and racks of goods that customers can browse and examine up close—and ask yourself: Is this so different from a museum? Packaging trends, too, acknowledge their thirst for learning. Never before has there been so much information printed on the boxes, bottles and jars we buy.
It is not too far-fetched to say even that stores have become places of worship—sites for the exaltation of man-made things, temples where we can express and reaffirm and share our belief in self-improvement, beauty, knowledge or fun. It’s no coincidence that of the two main holidays on the Christian calendar, Christmas and Easter, it is the former—the one with the greatest shopping potential—that every year becomes less exclusively religious and more secular, not to mention commercial. For most retailers, Christmas is make-or-break—the annual arrival of a savior, if you will.
Shopping is a universal experience. But our job is still the same: to suss out the parts that are universal from Paris to Toyko, and what parts are eternal, biologically-based elements like sight, right-handedness and gender. To figure out what’s changing, and why that is. The merchant community of today no longer leads but has to follow. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, shopping is a good dipstick of social change, and even, dare I say it, social revolution. So what does it mean when H&M and Steve and Barry’s both invent cheap disposable clothing that everyone wears? Why are farmers’ markets booming? Women now own homes—how does that alter the landscape? What are the implications for bricks-and-mortar store design as a result of the convergence of the online world and the mobile phone?
I hope this volume has polished your glasses and that it sends you back into your own world to look at things a little differently. Thanks for reading.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I graduated from college in the spring of 1975, one whole wall of my dorm room was plastered with rejection letters from literary magazines. What would have happened if just one thing had been accepted? I wanted to be a writer.
Instead, I went to New York City and, as this book chronicles, did other things, though I still scribbled things on the side. In 1979, Unmuzzled OX published one of my short stories in an anthology called The Poet’s Encyclopedia. Living in the midst of the downtown arts scene in New York, I was thrilled to have something to my name. Over the years I published articles in trade journals and wrote a chapter or two for books that have long since disappeared. My biggest literary payday was two hundred dollars. Which wasn’t to say I didn’t write, but it was research reports and lots and lots of proposals.
Ironically, the origins of this book are rooted in the magazine world. Two eminent journalists have been instrumental in transforming my career. Erik Larsen, author of many nonfiction bestsellers, wrote the first profile of Envirosell and yours truly for a 1993 issue of Smithsonian magazine. After the piece appeared, Envirosell was no longer functioning under the radar. Then, in the summer of 1996, shortly after we moved to our new offices at the corner of Twentieth and Broadway, a slight, curly-headed man turned up at our door saying that he was a science journalist now working for The New Yorker. I almost called the magazine to ask if they had someone named Malcolm Gladwell on staff. As I mention in these pages, Gladwell’s piece, entitled “The Science of Shopping,” came out in the fall of 1996 and changed Envirosell’s fortunes for the better.
No longer would I not know how to prioritize phone messages from strangers. Hundreds of people sent in résumés asking if they could work with us. As a shy, bald, bearded stutterer (whom Malcolm describes in his New Yorker piece as “almost goofy-looking”), I was invited to conferences and seminars, and countless newspapers and magazines suddenly wanted to talk to me. And talk is what I’ve done. I spend eight hours a week with the press. I listen, answer questions, give facts if I know them and opinions if I don’t.
In the wake of the New Yorker piece, the idea of a book took on a different meaning. My old friend Alexandra Anderson Spivey introduced me to Glen Hartley and his partner and wife, Lynn Chu, at Writer’s Representatives and they became my agents. Their attention has been invaluable. Amid their client list, I feel like a fat copper penny in a lineup of gold doubloons. At one point they had five books on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
Alice Mayhew has been my editor at Simon & Schuster for over a decade. I’ve watched her recast American history from books on the presidents to popular opuses on World War II. I’ve often wondered why she chooses to work with me, but never to her face. I am just glad for her wit, strong eye and steely intellect.
Bill Tonelli, a veteran magazine editor, helped make this book happen. He’s a stylin’ guy and a kind and gentle soul. Peter Smith, the son of my favorite high school English teacher and a contributing editor at O, the Oprah Magazine, has shepherded this rewrite. My assistant Angela Mauro has been a patient reader and tireless contributor.
Bits and pieces of this revised manuscript have appeared in columns I have written for DDI magazine and The Conference Board Review, under the respective editorial guidance of RoxAnna Sway and Vadim Liberman.
No one gets very far in the business world without friends and mentors. Richard Kurtz was my first market research teacher. Mitch Wolf provided early and valuable guidance. Both remain fixtures in my life. Today I have clients with whom I’ve worked for more than fifteen years. I appreciate the courage it took to buy our services the first time around, when we were a very exotic and risky purchase. Jim Lucas, now at Draft; Mike Ernest at Hanesbrands; Kevin Kitatkoski, now at Johnso
n & Johnson; Robin Pearl at Estée Lauder; Steven Smith at Hewlett-Packard; Linda Thompson at Microsoft; Tom Cook at King-Casey; Joe Gallo at Verizon Wireless; Ernesto Diaz at Sam’s Club; and Kris Loukusa, now at T-Mobile, are just a few. Others, like Wilton Connor and Bob Cecil, have retired, or are just missing from this list.
The store design community and the Retail Design Institute have been seminal in Envirosell’s success. Namely, Ken Nisch at JGA in Detroit, Kevin Kelley at Shook Kelley in Los Angeles, Andrew McQuilkin at RRCH in Cincinnati, Joe Nevin at Bergmeyer Associates in Boston, Denny Gerdeman and his wife Elle Chute at Chute Gerdeman in Columbus, Russell Sway from Sway Associates in Atlanta and last but not least, Monk Askew in Baltimore.
The corresponding community is made up of the designers and visual merchandisers at the stores themselves. Judy Bell at Target, Christine Belich at Sony Style, Michael Cape at Old Navy, James Damian at Best Buy, Janis Healy at West Marine, Glen Russell at Sears Holdings, Charles Zimmerman at Wal-Mart and Carmen Spofford at Federated are just a few who have tendered their support over the years.
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