Why We Shop

I read a great good over the past few days given to me by a friend of Allison's. It's called Why We Shop. It's a pretty incredible book. It discusses the science of shopping, or rather, the science of stores. The author, Paco Underhill, runs a company that spies on shoppers in stores, watching what the do, what they have trouble with, and what they eventually buy, and then consults stores to tell them how to build, setup, or change their stores to get more people to buy more stuff.

There's a couple of very interesting subtexts to the book, one implicit, the other explicit. The implicit subtext is that we're not rational actor when making purchases. It's kind of scary that free will can be shown to be a hazy, blurry thing in the world of retail. If a product is on a shelf a little higher or lower, if the coloring of the package is a different hue, if the aisles are laid in our in a different configuration, if the line is shorter, if you get more or less contact from store employees. All of things have an effect on your chance of making a purchase. The fact that people seemingly don't have control over their purchasing decisions is quite unnerving.

The explicit point made in the book is that without this impulse shopping, our economy would crash. If you could flip a switch, and people only went to the store when they they intended to buy something, and bought only what they intended to buy, our economy would be turned off, overnight.

These two concepts have an implication that I've felt true for a while: that the economy doesn't reward everyone who deserves reward. If your decision to trade money for goods and services can be swayed on any of the things mentioned above, all empirically shown to have a measurable effect on purchase decision, these show that the invisible hand is more like a blindfolded hand, rewarding things that we don't neccesarily want or need to be rewarding. Tapping into pyschological weakness to encourage people to spend more seems like a dangerous game to play.