Gift Giving Guy

I just finished reading Paco Underhill’s Call of the Mall,an insider’s walking tour of that ubiquitous institution, the shopping mall. Underhill, a sort of shopping anthropologist and the author of Why We Buy,guides us through the ins and outs of the mall, bringing along a retail designer, a visual design merchandiser, a married guy shopping for jewelry for his wife, a gaggle of teenage girls and more. I enjoyed its conversational, first-person style. For example, he begins his chapter on mall restrooms with this lead: “I need to use the bathroom, and you’re coming with me.”

When I read a book, listen to a lecture or attend a conference, I try to distill the experience into a number of takeaways: highlights that I found most interesting, meaningful or insightful. Below are my ten takeaways from Call of the Mall.

1. The areas of the mall you experience first, those nearest to the entrances, generally have the least attractive tenants from a shopping perspective. Why do you find video game arcades, banks, beauty parlors and post offices in these high traffic areas? Underhill calls these areas the mall’s decompression zones because most shoppers zip right past them to make the transition into the mall proper. He says, “You walk through any door and suddenly your brain has to take in a load of new information and process it so you’ll feel oriented. You’re not really ready to make any buying decisions for the first ten or fifteen feet. This transition stage is one of the most critical things we’ve learning in two decades of studying how shoppers move through retail environments. Nothing close to the door really registers.” Instead, shoppers are seeking get deeper into the mall because the best stores are never by the mall entrances.
2. Of course, the mall caters to women. And women shoppers care most about “nose and toes,” that is, cosmetics and shoes. Underhill writes: “For most women, those are the areas that matter most. The extremes — the face and hair and the feet. When choosing a jacket or skirt, there’s some leeway for color and style and fit. Even in underwear. Most women are not expecting absolute perfection. But when you are talking about makeup or shoes, the standards suddenly go way up. No woman is going to settle.” Also, high-end cosmetics never go on sale. Discounting the price makes the product less attractive. Instead, manufactures offer a gift-with-purchase, “a $25 value.” The idea is to give the feeling of saving $25 without actually lowering the price of the makeup.
3. It comes as no surprise that most men view the mall differently than women, but Underhill offers specifics. “A recent study of how men and women differ when it comes to the mall turned up this fact: Men, once you get them in the door, are much more interested in the social aspect of malls than the shopping part, whereas women say the social aspect is important but shopping comes first. Men enjoy the mall as a form of recreation — they like watching people and browsing around in stores more than shopping. Maybe they’ll spend fifteen minutes in a bookstore or a stereo store and leave without buying a thing. They treat it like an information-gathering trip. Men also like the non-retail parts — the rock climbing walls, the food courts, anything that doesn’t actually require them to enter stores and look at, try on, or buy merchandise. Women, of course, are there for exactly those things.”
4. Some retailers deliberately offer too many choices and create confusing displays to make you rely on a sales associate for direction. Underhill explains that this frustration approach “is based on the principle that a shopper who requires sales assistance is more likely to buy than one who shops solo.”
5. Underhill reveals the age-old rationales for jewelry purchases. “Traditionally, jewelry has been purchased by men for women, in three basic arrangements. The first is keys to the front door — call it engagement, anniversary, birthday — all public statements of affection and intention. The second is keys to the back door, which are presents to mistresses or girlfriends that are meant to ensure access, but bypass all of the front-door commitments. The third category, which for the jeweler has traditionally been important, is the keys out of the doghouse, or the purchases meant to make amends for bad behavior.” But jewelry sales have changed. More women are buying jewelry for themselves as a “self-reward and making the leap between who she is and who she wants to be.”
6. Underhill offers more thoughts on males and malls. He says most men’s shopping style involves “a great deal of procrastination, followed by a panicky trip… at the eleventh hour. A lot of men shop that way — it’s shopping for people who hate shopping.” He also asks “Can a man love a mall?” The short answer is no (at least not the way women do). Why? “Start by looking at the very composition of the mall — overwhelmingly, the stores are meant for female shoppers,” Underhill says. “Women’s apparel is the number one category. Men’s clothing and shoes are way down near the bottom of the list. Once, malls frequently included stores selling books, stereos, TVs, toys, sporting goods, items that at the very least gave men something to idly browse.” But no more. Men tend to prefer the strip shopping centers where they can dart in and out. And when men do shop, generally, it’s swift and surgical. “Men shop like the drive,” Underhill writes. “They refuse to ask directions unless they are absolutely desperate. Inside a store, it is our experience, men will bolt in this direction anfd then that, trying to find what they came in for. If they don’t locate it relatively quickly, they are more likely than women to give up and walk out.” Underhill is quick to acknowledge these gender characterizations as stereotypes, and they do not always hold, especially for younger males, who view the mall as “freedom from parental control.”
7. Ron, a retail designer, talks with Underhill in a J. Jill women’s clothing store on his theory of shopping. “Part of shopping is discovering. It may even be a very important part of its appeal. It feels as though it’s tapping into some primordial instinct we have for hunting and gathering — we like the actual process of finding things. When we enter a store for the first time, our senses are fully alert and our eyes are moving all over the place. We’re sniffing the air, and our ears are scanning for clues about what kind of place this is. That’s part of what makes shopping a fun thing to do. It’s what distinguishes one store from another.”
8. Ron also notes the trend of high-end brands offering lower-end products. “Look at what every luxury brand has done in the last decade or so — they’ve all searched for ways to sell things to less-affluent customers. There are moderately priced Mercedes-Benzes now. Armani has high-end stores, midprice stores, and stores for young shoppers interested in jeans and T-shirts. Every big-name designer has what they call a bridge line to pull in the younger shopper with less to spend.”
9. Underhill observes that few malls are being built in America because we are “all malled up.” He believes the mall’s tragic flaw is that they are not managed by merchants. “This is an industry driven by real estate, not retailing…. Beyond opening the doors and turning on the lights, what kind of retailing savvy has the mall exhibited? How has it kept up with and responded to the social and economic changes of the past two or three decades? Ask yourself this: What have been the coolest recent innovations at the mall? The food court? Ferris wheels?… There hasn’t been a hot novelty for some time.”
10. While the dot-com bubble has burst, online shopping still has transformed the retail landscape. “Online shopping plays to the heart of the mall audience — middle class, middle-aged and younger, pressed for time, already in front of a computer every day,” Underhill writes. “The promise of mall as community is being realized at eBay, the flea market of the 21st century. There, and at good shopping sites such as Amazon, there’s an experience superior in some ways to the real world. Amazon seems to recognize also that the future of any shopping medium isn’t based on its popularity with Silicon Valley male geeks, but on how it plays with overworked and overcommitted women in mainstream America. Look at Amazon’s most dazzling innovation — one-click buying, whereby, with a single click of the mouse, the sale is rung up and ownership of the goods has transferred from them to you. The world of retail has yet to figure out a painless, graceful way to handle the transaction itself — the cash register experience. Whether you’re at McDonald’s or Nordstrom, the exchange of money for goods takes place in essentially the same way, and poses the same potential for anxiety, frustration, and unhappiness.”