The Science Of Shopping Analysis

Nowadays, many people own smartphones as well as other technological devices. We use them to do a variety of activities such as reading the news, shopping, surfing the web, etc. However, as we are doing these things, companies are tracking our actions, and often without our knowledge. For example, they can observe what products we spend time looking at, and then show more ads of that same item. Basically, the information they obtain from tracking us is utilised by various companies as a way to improve their marketing. While this sounds like a useful method, there is some controversy: is this an invasion of the customers’ privacy? After all, I am sure that everyone values their privacy, and would not be at ease knowing that what they do online is being tracked. Having considered both sides of the issue, I believe that companies should not be allowed to track customers without their consent.

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.

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.

For my research assignment “The shopping trip” I decided to purchase a Camera as a mystery shopper. The stores I chose for shopping was best buy, the source and future shop. Here I am going to talk about my sale experience with two stores: best buy and The Source. The reason of selecting these stores is that I had a different experience on both stores and there was lot of things to analyse and contrast between salespersons.

Ever been persuaded or convinced that a product works because of an advertisement? The writer in The Onion puts a satirical tone on the behavior of consumers in today's economy. The overstatements of the author's writing show their thoughts on the retail market. The writer uses hyperboles, irony, and diction to convey his thoughts on the manipulative method of retail.

I feel that being tracked can be viewed as positive and negative. The reason I believe being tracked can be a positive thing is because being tracked someone somewhere has a location of where you. It can either be by phone, credit, cameras, social networks all these things give you an exact location on where you are making it easier to find you if something ever goes wrong .It can also be look at as a negative because random people know your location and that’s not information for everyone. To know it scary to know are to possibly think that wherever I am I’m being tracked that doesn’t make me feel safe it makes me unhappy to know that I have no privacy. When it comes to deciding whether the services we gain are worth the privacy we give up

Do you feel like your privacy is safe in stores?Well, cameras located in stores are able to acquire an abundant amount of information on its customers just by capturing their image on camera. This is absolutely an invasion of privacy, and that’s why most people feel that cameras should not be placed in stores and invade their privacy.To begin with, your mug shot can be leaked, and everyone will know your identity, it is a violation of privacy and cameras are expensive and difficult to manage. Therefore, cameras should not be used in stores.

“What makes the supermarket congestion even worse is that shoppers are taking longer and longer to decide what they want to buy, because every product in America now comes in an insane number of styles and sizes.”

Consumers must feel that they are making the right decision. Physical stores can not only offer a beautiful place filled with all sorts of aesthetically appealing items, but also they offer a social experience. For many, “going food shopping” has become a ritualistic outing. Thus, online suppliers must counter-act this. In order to do so, not only must they somehow lure the consumer in in the first place, but also they must be mindful that the consumers’ experiences must be perfect. This means that they must first engage the clients without having a location and then be sure that inventory and offerings are totally accurate and that no products are damaged in the process. Online suppliers have tried to differentiate themselves and find a niche in offering something that is more “green” and environmentally friendly. Whilst supermarkets can only tell customers to bring their own bags, online retailers not only can say that they are more ecologically friendly, but also offer even more “green” options at a higher cost. Operationally this translates into a massive online experience that needs qualified programmers, designers, product development experts, able to discern the right online configuration needed to convince

At 4:30 p.m. on December 6, 2010, Meredith Collins, VP of Marketing for Reed Supermarkets, walked down the sidewalk of the 10-store strip mall that housed Reed’s Westgate Plaza branch in Columbus, Ohio. Collins didn’t shop; instead she took mental notes about store traffic, first at the Reed store and then at an indirect but increasingly worrisome kind of competitor—a dollar store. The Reed was predictably well lit and inviting, and Collins could see three registers open and two or three customers in line at each. “Not too bad” she thought, “but not what I would hope for at this time of day, this close to the holidays.” She’d felt the same way at two other Reeds

So you've just bought your first apartment and you've never felt more independent. You think to yourself, I don't need mum and dad, I'm on my own now! Well, you think this until you realise that you've spent all your money on rent before proceeding to call mum and dad in need of a loan that you promise you'll back when really, you won't.

In a world perceived under constant surveillance much like the dystopian setting of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ novel, it is expected to view the practices that Malcolm Gladwell introduced in his article, The Science of Shopping, as frightening. However, the main intentions of these remarkable tactics are greatly misunderstood and Gladwell does an excellent job of clearing up many misconceptions around this topic. For instance, he introduces Paco Underhill, a self-proclaimed urban geographer who is a professional in the field of retail planning and posses a lengthy list of credentials. He also identifies and illustrates the concepts of decompression zone, invariant right, petting, “butt-brush” theory in his article and breaks down their purposes because there is a precise science in how the average consumer shops and specialists have decoded these behaviors. Unfortunately, a large portion of the population is petrified of Underhill’s capabilities and these psychological techniques that markets use to lure potential consumers. Although this is a typical reaction considering the state of society as of today, Gladwell correctly clarifies these misinterpretations all throughout his article. Furthermore, all of these maneuvers that he mentioned serve as hooks to attract customers are essential to the retailing industry and Paco Underhill tests them out by inspecting shoppers via surveillance cameras. His research is based on the psychological patterns of the average customer and his

“What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tailwind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn 't a strategy” (Jeff Bezos). Shopping is always changing, just as everything else around us. Shopping has gone as far back as the 1500’s. Since then it has changed a great deal, at first shopping was just trading anything you found had the same value as the thing you wanted. Over the years things changed and the people that owned shops were mostly owned by craftsmen such as carpenters, bakers, butcher, and blacksmiths. Centuries have passed and shopping became the pastime for most people more and more people spent their time looking for items with their friends and families. In the 20th century more and more people started buying, home computers and one man had the great idea to make a store through the internet and his name was Jeff Bezos, he created the most visited store in the internet called Amazon on July 5, 1994. At first Amazon only sold books, but over time it started getting more and more merchandise to sell and now it sells books, electronics, candy, or furniture it has involved into the first place you can go to get anything you might need in an everyday basis and becoming what the founder wanted as an “everything store”. Shopping is to visit one or more stores or websites to buy goods such as clothes,

With an increasingly consumerist society, the crowds and queues at the markets and stores using the conventional shopping processes, are inevitable, our aim is to change that by making the shopping at a store and maintaining a warehouse easy through Near Field Communication. The system that we are going to implement cuts down the costs of maintaining a product serial number based database and most importantly saves time in the checkout process and hence an expanding customer base for the store that it is implemented in. We intend to make the system as intuitive as possible so that it can be easily used by people who are not very technologically aware. We have also decided to add a recommendation engine to our app that will

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