Buying Experiences, Not Things By James Hamblin

Eric G. Wilson was born in 1967, and attended Appalachian State University, Wake Forest University, and the City University of New York where he gained a Ph.D. Wilson is currently a professor at Wake Forest University who teaches courses on British and American Romanticism. He has written many books, and “The Miracle of Melancholia” was published in the Los Angeles Times. I have never really thought too much about the effects that sadness can have on people, especially the positive effects. After reading the first paragraph of this piece, I was a little skeptical but as I continued to read, the author’s argument further developed and I now agree that sadness can have positive effects.

Shopping, a common activity conducted by almost everyone at least once a month, is such a normal subject in our everyday life, one barely puts any thoughts into the potential semiotic explanations behind it. According to the two essays, “The Signs of Shopping” and “The Science of Shopping,” Shopping has significant impacts on one’s self-identification. It is a two way straight, the consumers’ shopping styles can also influence the economic status of the retails businesses.

To be successful in a capitalistic government, you must be willing to step on the heads of those who are below you, and claim their successes as your own. Advertisements within our capitalistic culture act as a way to force the customer into buying what the corporate overlords want you to buy. Anne Norton, author of “The Signs of Shopping” is a heavily published author, and has earned many awards in her field. In her essay, she explains how businesses use advertisement techniques to increase the profits in a retail store. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of “The Science of Shopping” is a staff writer for the New Yorker. In his essay, he explains how Paco Underhill, a retail expert, taught many Forbes 500 companies how to create more opportunities to up-sale to their customers. Norton shows how malls and other shopping outlets only want one demographic to shop in their stores, and Gladwell shows how stores utilize their internal structure to make more money. Both utilize a negative tone toward the business practices shown in the articles, and demonstrate the manipulation of the consumer with the usage of imagery within advertisements to show that capitalism is unethical.

Malcolm Gladwell’s piece, “The Science of Shopping”, causes his audience to fear retail anthropologists such as Paco Underhill. On the surface, Gladwell appears to write a short documentary of sorts about the manipulation of businesses and stores. Venturing deeper into the story provides the reader with vision of the importance businesses place on their layouts and strategies. Gladwell continues to assure his point that consumers are not mindlessly obeying what retailors want them to do. Store owners are required to accommodate to how their customers behave, and what their target market wants. Gladwell refers to significant moments with Underhill by directly quoting Paco. He also vividly describes different aspects of Paco’s practice.

A famous writer for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has written an article, “The Science of Shopping”, which is based on Paco Underhill’s study of retail anthropology. The intention of a retail store is obvious- that is to attract customers and convince them to perchance as much as they can. There is so much knowledge that we can study, such that how the environment affects people’s thinking. These are tiny details that we don’t usually think about. The reason of how Paco Underhill success is because he notices these details. Details determine success or failure. Paco Undnerhill—a talent and passion environmental psychologist, provides us a new point of view of the science of displaying products,

For the amount of time that I was engaged in anchoring my mind to the current moment I noticed that there was a constant battle between myself and my mind, meaning there was strong urge to latch onto the thoughts and find meaning in them rather than just allowing myself to observe these thoughts. According to Chodron (2013) there are five reasons to meditate and one of the reasons is to cultivate attention towards every moment in our lives, which is important as she state “that we have allot of resistance to just being there!” (Chodrom, 2013, p. 4).

Malcolm Gladwell is currently a non-fiction writer for The New Yorker. After college, he took a journalism position in Indiana and later took a position in Washington. In 1996, he moved to New York, where he is today. He has written five books and each has been on the New York Times best seller list (Famous Authors). In his first year of working as a journalist for The New Yorker, he wrote, “The Science of Shopping.” In this piece, Gladwell objectively evaluates Paco Underhill’s research within the business industry. Underhill “would have from a hundred to five hundred pages and pages of carefully annotated tracking sheets and anywhere from a hundred to five hundred hours of films” for each experiment that he conducts (99). With Underhill’s determination and research, and Gladwell’s journalistic qualities, this report changes the way anyone views shopping.

Everyday thousands of retail stores throughout the United States open up their stores in the morning for the sole purpose of attracting customers and selling them merchandise. For this assignment I decided to do a store analysis of the retail giant Wal-Mart. To begin with I will evaluate the store layout and design. Next I will explain the visual merchandising techniques used that Wal-Mart uses. Finally I will discuss the problems and recommendations that I have for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has continually been a leader in the retail industry, and it all starts with the layout of the store.

Why should people be able to postpone their desire? Desire is a sense of hoping for something. Scientists have discovered that if people could control their inner desire, they would be more likely to have self-discipline, higher SAT scores and are more successful. Delayed gratification is a person’s ability to control his/her desire for something for a period of time.

Happiness is a fickle concept and is something every person on this planet seeks out for self-fulfillment. Happiness also gives our lives a sense of perfection. Everyone is in the pursuit of happiness, but not all will find it with guarantee. Happiness can occur at any point in someone’s life, depending on the circumstance or what the individual desires greatly. However, happiness does not come and should not arise from materialistic values. James Hamblin uses the rhetorical devices of ethos, pathos, and logos to promote this theory of how happiness is achieved in “Buy Experiences, Not Things” to show the reader that there is more to life than materialistic values.

Psychologist James Hamblin believes that happiness comes from experiences that occur in life rather than the materials life has to offer. In other words, a person will be happier in the long run going on vacation rather than buying a new phone. Hamblin’s article creates an argument in hopes of encouraging people to enjoy the moments in life and not the big or little things. Hamblin argues that ‘if you pay for an experience, like a vacation, it will be over and gone; but if you buy a tangible thing, a couch, at least you 'll have it for a long time” (Hamblin 2014). A person may be able to buy something and have it in possession for a long period of time,

For generations, Americans has been brainwashed by the media to believe that what is displayed on television is the ideal perception of what real beauty have manipulated American citizens of what style looks like. Furthermore, with their many brainwashing strategies, that means more and more consumers spending beyond their budget. Our perspectives have been heavily influenced by what they believe is nice, but can we afford it all? With unrealistic combination of goods in store, plazas, and mall, consuming has become a bad behavior of some. In support of my argument of the “Overspending”, author Gladwell’s article “The Science of Shopping” also argues that stores adjust to fit the needs and wants of the shopper are evidently presented. With that being said, we have no idea when we are being manipulated into unrealistic shopping behavior that is influenced by the way the advertisement is presented in visual sight. Author Gladwell gets a “retail anthropologist” and “urban geographer” named Paco Underhill to give breakdown points of how he helps brand name stores influence consumers into persuasion of buying more. However, most of us fall short of that discipline, while being persuaded to overspend during our store visits.

Consumers have certain behavioral tendencies when faced in certain situations. In Why We Buy, the author Paco Underhill details certain behavioral characteristics people tend to have in different types of retail stores. Many consumers don’t think about what their actions mean when checking out or buying products. But to Mr. Underhill, the gender of the person, the people they’re with, the amount of times the person touches an object, the amount of time spent on checking a particular product, the time they came in, and the time they leave, all factor into a database to determine different behavioral trend consumers have. It is these trends that they find in order to correct a problem a store or retailer didn’t know they have to increase sales and create a better flow in the store environment.

Affective motives deal with the need to reach satisfying feeling states and to obtain personal goals (Hawkins, 2010). Another shopping situation on my personal consumption is line 15 page 2, April 14, 2012, my family on an impulse spent $143.07 dollars on recreational products. Even after this shopping situation, I could not understand how or why I allowed my family that is trying to save money spend so much of it. However slowly understanding our purchasing behaviors, I can understand that it relates to the need for tension reduction and some hedonic shopping motives. People encounter situations in their daily lives that create uncomfortable levels of stress. In order to effectively manage tension and stress, people are motivated to seek ways to reduce arousal. Recreational products and activities are often promoted in terms of tension relief (Hawkins, 2010). After closely observations of my consumption journal, I think most of our purchasing

In the article “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness,” Jon Gertner conveys his argument that the resulting emotions that people predict they will feel when a certain event happens are often times quite less extreme than they originally believe them to be. The prediction that a person makes about the outcome of an experience, whether it be buying a new television or being fired from a job, is most likely wrong. Gertner, with the help of the research done by Gilbert, Wilson, Loewenstein, and Kahneman, focuses on how one can predict what will make him or her unhappy or happy, and if his or her predictions remain true throughout, and after, the occurrence.