Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping

Shopping is more than buying. It’s a process that involves the senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Towels, bedsheets, and especially clothing are fondled before they’re purchased: Patrons want to know how something will feel before they agree to wear it. Touching helps us choose lotions, cosmetics, tools, purses, and briefcases, but not, for example, light bulbs.

Shoppers want to taste-test new foods, but there aren’t enough samples; without taste tests, 90% of new food items fail simply “because people never tried them" (173). On the other hand, some grocery stores bake bread or brew coffee to generate pleasing, mouth-watering aromas that attract customers. Some retailers, including liquor stores, pipe in scents appropriate to their merchandise and the age of their shoppers, with sweeter aromas for younger patrons and savory for older shoppers. One English infant apparel store pipes in baby powder, with its evocative smell, through the ventilation ducts.

Trust in brand names has weakened, and shoppers are more skeptical. More of them will open the packaging to feel the product. Adults still have some of the child’s need to touch everything. Underhill suggests that our sense of ownership begins when we touch merchandise and like how it feels. Thus, retailers must emphasize the sensory part of the shopping experience.

Some products—appliances, for example—are hard to evaluate in the showroom simply by touching them. In the home, they’ll make noise, but how much is hard to guess, and stores rarely plug them in so that shoppers can find out. Linens aren’t judged by thread count—“What is thread count? Damned if most people know" (180)—but by feel, yet bedsheets hide inside plastic packaging. Smart retailers take sample sheets, wash out the stiffness, and hang them up for customers to fondle.

Clothing stores understand the need to feel fabrics, but they skimp on changing rooms, where final buying decisions are made. Studies show that upgrading these rooms—making them easy to find, with comfortable and stylish interiors, lighting and mirrors that flatter, a foyer for friends and their advice, and attentive clerks who suggest accessories—greatly increases sales.

Many stores suffer losses when customers tear open packaging to test what’s inside. Instead of offering samples, stores display tamper-proof packaging; sales suffer as a result, some patrons defeat the tamper-proofing anyway, and no one is happy. One solution is packaging that can easily be replaced in-store. Toy makers often design their products to permit the buyer to test the toy while it’s still in its container. Apple Stores display electronic devices that can be tried out.

Items meant to be touched won’t be if displayed too neatly; it’s better to mess them up a bit, so customers believe they have permission to handle the items. 

The “Big Three” of retail are “design” (the store and its layout), “merchandising” (the products for sale), and “operations” (the work employees do). Changes in any one of the Big Three will affect all the others. Such changes can cause unpleasant surprises, and a problem in one area can burden the other two.

Display and package designers often fail to visit stores to see how their creations behave in the real world. For example, herbal products tend to appeal to better-educated buyers, who like to read labels before buying. Manufacturers therefore add lots of verbiage, but herbal buyers also tend to be older and can’t read all the small print, especially in crowded drugstore aisles. Design and packaging execs could coordinate and prevent these problems, but often they’re only acquainted through the corporate turf battles they fight against each other.

To create more space for merchandise, a major department store’s director of ladies’ shoes had portions of the checkout counters removed, forcing cashiers to bag items on the floor, which quickly exhausted and frustrated them and reduced sales volume. A video chain decided to paint store interiors a rich burgundy and decorate with rows of light bulbs, like on theater marquees, but the dark color showed scuffs and scratches, the bulbs burned out and required constant replacement, and burgundy reflected light weakly, making the stores dim. Costs rose significantly. Such mistakes demonstrate that “when you change one thing, everything changes” (197).

Shoppers want more service these days, but store labor costs a lot of money, and retailers constantly search for ways to cut back on staffing. A result is that the store’s design and merchandise must do the selling. Sometimes interactive computer displays are brought in to answer customer questions, but the devices are balky and hard to use, so patrons simply ask a clerk to explain them. Overworked employees save time by overstocking shelves, making it hard for customers to extract the products they want.

There are some workarounds. The United States Postal Service moved self-service tables from the rear of their stores to the front, where incoming patrons could see them easily, and self-serve activity rose. Instead of lining up aspirin bottles carefully on shelves, which takes time and labor, a French market chain put a large picture of the aspirin label over a bin filled with aspirin bottles. Employees were spared the tedious shelving work, and shoppers got a big sign with clear lettering. 

Up to a point, customers accept waiting, but beyond that they become frustrated. A short wait gets good marks, but a long wait will ruin a store's reputation. Beyond about a minute and a half, people in line begin to overestimate their wait. Underhill notes the fine line: “Taking care of a customer in two minutes is a success; taking care of a customer in three minutes is a failure” (202).

Given that people’s perception of time can distort, it’s possible to “bend” it in the retailer’s favor. When store clerks chat with customers in line, even simply to apologize for a delay, the customers will perceive their wait to be shorter than it was. A store manager who arrives to handle patrons’ questions or help with checkout can speed up the perceived as well as the actual wait time. Banks and telephone help lines often display or announce estimated wait times, which reassures customers standing in line or on hold. Americans dislike mobs at checkout; orderly single-file lines reassure them. Underhill explains: “This is the secret to bending time: get rid of the uncertainty and you cut the perceived wait” (203).

One long line is fairer but also more daunting. The compromise is a few smaller lines. Some stores, like electronics chain Best Buy, use a checkout system that snakes through a short maze of tall walls covered in attractive impulse-buy items that obscure the length of the wait. Any system that organizes the wait, even if it’s imperfect, will reassure shoppers. Diversions also help: Video screens, tabloid newspapers, and signs to read can shorten the perceived wait time.

Reducing store staffing causes another form of wait time: the search for a clerk who can answer questions. Further delays happen at locked cabinets that protect expensive items, forcing the customers to search for an employee with a key. Fewer thefts are thus bought at the cost of many fewer sales. 

Nobody likes to pay, so retailers must make checkout painless and even entertaining. While waiting in line, patrons browse alluring impulse items. Technology now permits shoppers to self-check items and pay with the swipe of a card.

The logical place for the “cash/wrap” checkout registers is near the front of the store, but placing them too near the entrance can intimidate customers, who approach the front doors, see long lines of patrons waiting to part with their money, conclude that the store is too busy even when it’s not, and go to another store.

When stores reduce staff, checkers get overloaded, especially at rush times. During the holidays, gift-wrapping is important, but forcing a checker to stop ringing up purchases to wrap a gift will seriously annoy people waiting in line. It’s better to have a dedicated place for gift wrap and let customers do it themselves.

Stores that skimp on checkout ruin their customers’ shopping experience; those that locate and staff them properly will have happy patrons. 

Merchandise sells better if it pops into a customer’s awareness. There are many ways to get this effect. Books, for instance, sell better if their covers, rather than their spines, face out. Adjacencies—related items placed next to each other to increase sales of both—also add to the bottom line: “New computer mouse? Try this mouse pad. New car? Try this stylin’ floor mat. The Gap now sells fragrances and candles. Victoria’s Secret sells cosmetics” (214). An Austin bookstore anchors its cookbook section around an antique stove and puts barber chairs in the sports section.

Some stores get it wrong, though. Computer retailers tend to isolate the computers from printers, screens, and accessories. Grocery stores miss an opportunity if they fail to place taco shells at the beef counter as well as in the ethnic food section. Lotion and shampoo samples should be sold next to the full-size versions instead of merely elsewhere in a bin.

Careful positioning of an item can affect its sales. At a cafeteria, bags of potato chips sold better at the cashier end of the line than at the beginning. Gift wrap sold poorly at a store entrance but did well near the checkout lines “because nobody buys the paper before they buy the gifts” (217). Selling things in ensembles—a chest used as a table next to a sofa, for example—creates juxtapositions that can charm and inspire shoppers, getting them to buy things they didn’t know they wanted.

The point-of-purchase business, or “PoP,” manufactures the signage, displays, and racks that help sell merchandise in stores. PoP has become a dominant part of marketing and has made vast improvements in how stores communicate with shoppers. PoP designers have learned to print free-standing signs on both sides, as they don’t know where those signs will be stationed. They’ve also learned that displays that move or have twinkling lights draw much more attention than static displays; however, a store full of such displays will overload shoppers’ senses, and the displays will “cancel each other out” (222).

Sometimes the best-laid design plans go awry. A fancy display of spices that arranged products into spices, extracts, essences, and flavorings had no effect on sales; apparently shoppers don’t think about spice categories. A soft-drink company designed a beautiful display; at an in-store test the cases of drink were hastily stacked in a huge pile near the front, and that mountain of soda, all by itself, engaged shoppers and sold better than any previous display system.