Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping

“Using the system of shorthand notation we’ve developed over the years, a combination of symbols, letters and hash marks, a tracker can record, for instance, that a bald, bearded man in a red sweater and blue jeans entered a department store on a Saturday at 11:07 a.m., walked directly to a first-floor display of wallets, picked up or otherwise touched a total of twelve of them, checked the price tag on four, then chose one, and moved at 11:16 to a nearby tie rack, stroked seven ties, read the contents tags on all seven, read the price on two, then bought none and went directly to the cashier to pay.”

Market research firm Envirosell uses a carefully designed system of information gathering to observe shopper behavior at stores and public spaces. Teams of “trackers” watch covertly as customers wander the aisles, touch merchandise, and read labels; this data, along with video recordings of various parts of the store, provide detailed information that can help retailers to fine-tune their displays, store layouts, and equipment to improve the customer experience and ease the load on workers.  

“If, in one day, we track a hundred shoppers in that store’s health and beauty aisle, it amounts to twenty-five hundred separate data entries. As the woman exits the section, we interview her, asking twenty questions in all. So each of the twenty-five data points has to be cross-tabulated with each of her twenty answers—a cross-tab challenge, take it from me. Until quite recently no university ever attempted such a study, and so it was left to the world’s businesses—its retailers, banks, restaurant chains, manufacturers and designers of displays and packaging—to underwrite the creation of this science, which they did and continue to do by hiring us and sending us out into the field.”

The science of shopping was invented by retailers and market-research companies, the groups that needed the information. The work is anthropological in nature—it’s the study of people’s behavior within the cultural context of shopping—and the information thus derived, to be useful, must be rigorously and scientifically obtained and vetted, not by scholars but by people in the field. Shopping science, then, is one social science that isn’t headquartered within the halls of academe. 

“If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would collapse—boom.”

People shop and buy for more reasons than simple need: There are other things we seek than utility. We want not so much things as good feelings. We'll buy what makes us feel good about ourselves or suggests an attractive lifestyle or evokes fond memories.