Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping

The butt-brush factor arises from the fact that “women have an actual aversion to examining anything much below waist level, for fear of being jostled from the rear” (126). Basically, women don’t like to bend over in public. Products aimed at women therefore should not be placed on bottom shelves. 

The capture rate is the percentage of shoppers who look at a given item. In grocery stores, the typical rate is around 20%. For items shelved higher than people’s height or lower than their knees, the capture rate is minimal. Those shelves do better holding bulk items, while smaller items and big sellers should go in between. 

Cash/wrap is the retailing term for checkout, where customers pay for their purchases, which then get wrapped up or bagged. Cash/wrap isn’t a mere formality but an important part of the shopping experience, and a badly handled checkout system—long wait times, cramped or inefficient register systems, sullen clerks—can turn a good shopping experience into a bad memory. Underhill explains, “If the transactions aren’t crisp, if the organization isn’t clear at a glance, shoppers get frustrated or turned off” (19). It’s a bad idea to put the registers in front of the store’s front doors, which is “like entering a restaurant through the kitchen. It just doesn’t do much to stoke your anticipation” (210). A better arrangement is to place them off to one side. 

Cat-man, or category management, is a part of retail consulting that “examines how a category of goods is shopped at the point of sale. […] Thus, rather than working for a retailer, we’re throwing our energy behind a consumer goods manufacturer” (260). Cat-man has become a major part of Envirosell’s business, especially in South America, where many international companies seek to position their products so they appeal to local tastes. 

Most stores install their shelving at right angles to the main aisles, but some stores place the shelves at an angle, so that they “vee” into the main aisle from either side, like sergeant’s chevrons, to show more of the merchandise. Chevroning helps increase customer engagement, though it takes up more floor space, limiting the total number of items that can be displayed. There are other ways to accomplish shelf visibility, including shelving that starts low in a store’s center and gets taller toward the periphery. Another approach involves endcaps (see below), which display merchandise at the tail-end of an aisle’s shelving. 

Convergence is “the linkup between the physical world and mobile technology and the web—an improved union between stores, the online world and the mobile phone” (245). Examples include a cellphone that scans an item on a store shelf and receives information about it, or that acts as a wallet at checkout. Another type is a smart refrigerator that keeps track of its own contents and re-orders them when they run low. 

Conversion rate is “the percentage of shoppers who bought” (21). Conversion rates can vary widely, from less than half in some businesses to nearly 100% at grocery stores. It's simple but important: “it shows how well (or how poorly) the entire enterprise is functioning where it counts most: in the store” (31). Detailed analysis of conversion rates can reveal whether a store is serving various shopping groups fully: men as well as women, young and old, minorities of all types. It also can point to areas where the store fails or succeeds in making the shopping experience easy and pleasant versus hard and frustrating. 

Just beyond the entrance, the first 10 feet or so of a store is where entering shoppers get their bearings. This “decompression zone,” or “landing strip,” is a dead zone for marketing because patrons tend to ignore everything in the zone while they focus instead on orienting themselves, getting a sense of the store, and preparing to walk to the departments they want to visit. 

Endcaps are “the displays of merchandise on the end of virtually every American store aisle,” which “are tremendously effective at exposing goods to the shopper’s eye” (81). Items can get lost among the products on a long aisle, but those placed in endcaps capture customers’ eyes “because as we stroll through a store’s aisles we approach it head-on, seeing it plainly and fully” (82). 

Envirosell is a New York City-based market-research consultancy founded and run by Why We Buy author Paco Underhill. Envirosell developed groundbreaking techniques for analyzing shopper behavior, using a customizable system of in-store observations by teams of “trackers” who fill in roughly 40 data points on as many as 50 shoppers per day per tracker. This information, along with hours of videotape and reams of customer questionnaires, is digitized and collated to produce insights that retail establishments can use to improve their customers’ in-store experience.

Envirosell has helped major companies and institutions improve their customers’ in-store experience, including the United States Postal Service, Lincoln Center, Microsoft, Estée Lauder, Sam's Club, and Unilever. Envirosell has expanded internationally with offices in Europe, Brazil, Mexico City, and Japan. The company has learned that people everywhere behave similarly when they shop, though local customs add complications that must be considered by retailers in each region. 

Hardware stores, until recent decades, were bastions of maleness. Underhill calls them “Joe’s Hardware”:

Creaky planks on the floor. Weird smell of rubber and four-in-one oil in the air. Big wooden bin of ten-penny nails […] and over there—atop the rickety ladder, chewing a bad cheroot, rummaging blindly in an ancient box of two-prong plugs, cursing genially under his stogie breath—Joe himself (121).

Now that women have begun to shop there for their own home-improvement projects, they have raised complaints: “Not the right color. Not enough styles. The place stinks like cheap cigars" (122). The stores changed; Joe’s Hardware is a thing of the past, replaced by Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other women-friendly alternatives. 

In the past, items were displayed in cabinets, and experienced store clerks could explain them. Now, “the ‘open sell’ school of display puts most everything out there where we can touch or smell or try it” (176). With the growth of product diversity and the decline of brand-name power, fewer employees know about all the merchandise. Instead, items are displayed openly so that customers can inspect them for themselves. Thus, touch and other senses have become more important parts of buying decisions. 

The point-of-purchase business, or “PoP,” is “the industry that provides all the in-store merchandising materials—signs and display cases and impulse goods fixtures” (219). Because more shoppers are making buying decisions at the store, including the purchase of items they hadn’t planned on getting, PoP has come to dominate marketing. 

The Pre-Shop is the first step in Internet shopping, when the potential customer scans many products and vendors, learning product details and pricing. This process gives leverage to the patron but also makes it easier on the seller, as it computerizes much of the shopping process. The Pre-Shop is followed by Secondary Shopping Therapy.

The art of knowing what makes shoppers buy or fail to buy has, in recent decades, become a science, thanks in large part to the rigorous experimentation and data-gathering of the researchers at Envirosell. The science of shopping is a “highly practical discipline concerned with using research, comparison and analysis to make stores and products more amenable to shoppers” (10-11). Envirosell has learned that store layouts, signage, location of products on shelves, width of aisles, and many other factors can increase or decrease sales. These variables shift in importance at different types of stores, at various times of day, and with different clientele, but all affect a store’s revenues. The foundations for shopping science were laid by William Whyte, who studied urban spaces and how visitors used them. 

Secondary Shopping Therapy is the process of gawking at masses of alluring products but doing so online in privacy. This provides some of the same enjoyment and aspirational dreaming obtainable in department stores, but with a much vaster collection of merchandise. Underhill explains, “It invites everyone in to take a look and/or gawk to his or her heart’s content” (237), but without the need to get dressed, drive there, and push through crowds.

Shrinkage means “products that can’t be accounted for” (206), but basically it’s a polite word for retail theft. Shrinkage takes three forms: employee theft, professional thievery, and impulsive customers. Some stores lock up valuable items in glass cases, but buyers then must search for a clerk with a key, so this method can cause more sales to be lost than items stolen. Other retailers take more subtle approaches: Some will randomly announce, over loudspeakers, “Security to aisle six!” (207), even when they don’t have guards. Wal-Mart uses elderly employees as greeters who say hi to every incoming customer, in part because it’s harder for impulsive shoppers to repay a cheerful welcome by stealing from the store. (Wal-Mart reports a shrinkage rate of 1%.) 

A tracker quietly and surreptitiously makes notes on the behaviors of shoppers in a store, as many as 50 per day. Underhill explains, “Essentially, trackers stealthily make their way through stores following shoppers and noting everything they do” (5). The tracker collects this information on a “track sheet,” filling in about 40 data points per shopper. Trackers are trained carefully, and not everyone has the temperament to succeed at this type of work, which falls somewhere between master spy and research scientist. Trackers usually work in teams of several people per store. Envirosell pioneered the use of trackers.