Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

I have this bad habit of testing out entirely new lives inside my head every time I am exposed to new people and places, no matter how mundane. When I take a walk in my neighborhood, I imagine living in the two-story colonial on the corner, rather than in our single-story ranch. Would the traffic be noisy? Would our cats be safe? Would I hate running up and the down the stairs all day? What would our mortgage payments be? And before I know it, I’m calculating interest rates in my head for a house down the street from where I live.

Television—especially reality television—is prime fodder for such mental journeys. For example, if Queer Eye for the Straight Guy features an artist living in Las Vegas, I begin to imagine living in Las Vegas. What are the real estate values like? If we sold our house, could be buy something much bigger there? It might even have a swimming pool, which would definitely be necessary in the desert. What if I was an artist? Could I have a studio attached to the house? And on and on, until I remind myself that it reaches 120 degrees there all summer. And I once again realize that my own life suits me much better.

Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill gave me a whole new life to imagine for a few days. It got pretty bad. Usually my mental wanderings snap back after a few minutes, but because it took many days to read the book, I was living another life in my head for much longer than usual.

The premise of the book is quite interesting; I’m always fascinated by inquiries into psychological behaviors that pertain to everyday life. Underhill explains the physioligical and psychological factors that determine how shoppers choose what to buy and what not to buy. Based on years of research, he explains how everything from right-handedness to signage, to gender, affects store design and its efficacy.

The part that got my mind drifting, however, was how this information was gathered. Underhill is the founder of a company called Envirosell, which researches these shopping issues for large retailers. Envirosell hires agents to skulk around in stores for hours and hours, making notes on consumer behavior and trailing particular shoppers to record things like how many products she touches before choosing one, or whether she reads the signage, or what she does with her stroller while in the store.

Once I read this, I wanted to be an agent. I began imagining myself, clipboard in hand, melting into the racks of clothing as I followed a group of teenaged girls. I saw myself watching video footage of old ladies choosing aspirin in a drugstore aisle. I imagined working out of my home and flying to stores around the country to spend all week in a mall. Or maybe I would move to New York and be based out of their corporate offices, working on reports that synthesize all the data. My brain was getting out of hand.

In the end, I lost interest as the second half of the book began to bore me with its repetitiveness (as most of these pop-psychology books do). Underhill began using the same examples over and over to prove an only slightly different point. I skipped the chapter on online shopping altogether, as this book was written in 1999. And by the time I got to Part IV, the last thing I wanted to do was watch people shop all day. Underhill had simply bored the urge right out of me. I rushed through the rest of the book and put it away, leaving my mind free to imagine living in Paris as an expatriate novelist, or maybe in Wyoming as a cowgirl.

Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

tags: books book reviews shopping psychology consumer research Paco Underhill