Retail Anthropolgy: Spying

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.

In regards to,"The Science of Shopping" the author Malcolm Gladwell informs the reader with observations and science claims from Paco Underwill about shoppers and methods to promote ones marketing sells. Also, the tone of the passage illustrates marketing as a game, trying to determine how one can boost their merchandise. As well as, augmenting the consumers. Additionally, Paco references to Decompression Zone which he defines as the space that is right inside of a notable shopping building. Furthermore, Paco informs about the Invariant Right,"is a function of the fact that we "absorb and digest information in the left part of the brain" and assimilate and illogically use this information in the right half."

Marion Nestle, an author with a couple of published books and a teacher at New York University, dives into the how supermarkets encourage shoppers to buy more than they need in an essay taken from her 2006 book “What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating.” Nestle informs her audience of general shoppers on the topic of how supermarkets are prime real estate so that she can convince the audience that supermarkets do things to make more money by getting people to buy more. Nestle uses rhetorical strategies of having pathos, examples, and facts. Nestle begins her essay by utilizing pathos. She attends to the audience’s emotions by describing the mass amounts of choices shoppers must make when they shop and the stress that comes with shopping.

Today, Americans live in a world where we are constantly encouraged “to keep up with the Joneses” whether it be from advertisment, longer shopping hours, or multiple other factors. A surprising statistic you can find in the book, Affluenza: How overconsumption is killing us--and how to fight back, where it states that “70 percent of us visit malls each week, more than attended houses of worship” (15). Shopping has become so convenient in recent years due to online stores, as well as the growing number of shopping centers, that it’s become a problem. Kalle Lasn, co-founder of the magazine Adbusters and starter of the Occupy Movement, believes that, “Overconsumption is the mother of all of our environment problems” (197). Consumers have come to see shopping as a fun activity while spending time with friends or family. When really over consumption of material goods ultimately leads us to unhappiness, the unsatisfied desire to want more, and possibly put you into debt.

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.

The rapper Kanye West stated “She don`t believe in shooting stars but she believes in shoes and cars.” Malls, Outlets and online resources are the most common sources for shopping experiences for many people today. There are also the many food outlets and sales that encourage people to purchase items that may or may not be necessary. In her essay, “American Consumerism,” Jamie Bentley reflecting on Simon Benlow’s essay “An Apology to Future Generations” that expresses concern about consumers’ negative impact on the environment reveals this generation’s obsession with materialism, with the hope that people will learn to do more with less. The many options available to purchase items create a problem for individuals who desire to have what they

Shopping has become a daily activity which happens a billion times in America and around the world. We cannot imagine how our lives would be affected if shopping was suddenly stopped. Malcolm Gladwell and Anne Norton both write articles about two sides of modern day shopping: how consumers have impacted the retail industry and how the industry influences consumers. In the article " The Science of Shopping," Malcolm Gladwell, a well-known writer and journalist, analyzes the shopping behaviors of customers and how retailers can lure customers; while Anne Norton, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, in

“The Signs of Shopping” by Anne Norton mainly talks about the hidden semiotic meanings behind the concept of shopping. She mentioned how women shopped to obtain a sense of self-identities by spending money to possess property(88). The reading also implies that

Consumer culture today is thriving – but not necessarily in a good way. As consumer culture thrives, we have desires for products and services. Consumer spending is a major part of a country’s/world’s economy and that makes the economy strong but the aftermath is an unsustainable lifestyle. Although, Wall-E didn’t indicate exactly what caused consumers to destroy the planet and then flee for the sake of human survival, there are many guesses that can be made as to how it happened. One of the major points made in class during week eight was the fact that the world is becoming overpopulated. This major issue can possibly be

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,

Consumerism leads to self-gratification and the loss of life’s important values such as friendship, love and religion; this is an ever-growing issue that manipulates and deceives society and has done so since the beginning of the technological age.

Producers are enablers. They encourage people to spend money on things they don’t need and aren’t necessities. Consumers are like drug addicts, they shop for things they don’t need and are constantly striving to acquire what they don’t have. “We Americans are beyond a simple, possessive materialism.” (Rose) Americans have developed a shopping problem. We buy things simply for the

Hunger for luxury items and people’s strife for the brands and items they associate with being beyond reach is paramount for this system. It is this drive for items one can’t have that the author feels is one of the benefits of consumerism. He declares, “…the aspiration of the poor to

Consumerism is damaging to our society, in our North American society consumerism is often portrayed to be a negative aspect of people’s lives. However, one can also argue positive effects that result from consumerism, or emphasize on the negative effects of consumerism and how it can be a constraining force in one’s own life. Consumerism is an idea of an economic policy that the market is shaped by the choice of the consumer and continues to emerge to shape the world’s mass markets. Some of the negative effects of consumerism that many critics may argue and that will be further emphasized on are the overexploitation of consumerism which has lead to economic poverty, and increase

Shopping is one of the most common social activities in our life. Lingering in one store and another, the customers are looking for the products that meet their requirements and making decisions to purchase while enjoying the leisure time with their families or friends. At the same time, to achieve a better business performance, the retailers try to attract the customers to pay more attention to the products and stay longer in their stores by using various kinds of technologies to surveil the shoppers, such as using cameras to monitor their shopping behavior, tracking their purchased items, and even analyzing these consumers’ background. However, the surveillance of consumers by retail anthropologists is manipulative and unethical