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The New Yorker

November 4, 1996 A REPORTER AT LARGE

The Science of Shopping

The American shopper has never been so fickle.What are stores, including the new flagship designer boutiques, doing about it? Applying science.

by Malcolm Gladwell1.

Human beings walk the way they drive, which is to say that Americans tend to keepto the right when they strolldown shopping-mallconcourses or city sidewalks.This is why in a well-designed airport travellersdrifting toward their gate will always find the fast-foodrestaurants on their left andthe gift shops on their right:people will readily cross alane of pedestrian traffic tosatisfy their hunger butrarely to make an impulse buy of a T-shirt or amagazine. This is also why Paco Underhill tells hisretail clients to make surethat their window displaysare canted, preferably to both sides but especially tothe left, so that a potentialshopper approaching thestore on the inside of thesidewalk-the shopper, thatis, with the least impeded view of the store window-can see the display from atleast twenty-five feet away.Of course, a lot depends onhow fast the potential shopperis walking. Paco, in hisprevious life, as an urbangeographer in Manhattan,spent a great deal of timethinking about walking speedsas he listened in on the greatdebates of the nineteen-seventies over whether thetraffic lights in midtownshould be timed to facilitatethe movement of cars or tofacilitate the movement of pedestrians and so break upthe big platoons that movedown Manhattan sidewalks.He knows that the faster you walk the more your peripheral vision narrows, so you becomeunable to pick up visual cuesas quickly as someone who is just ambling along. He knows,too, that people who walk fasttake a surprising amount of time to slow down-just as ittakes a good stretch of road tochange gears with a stick-shiftautomobile. On the basis of his research, Paco estimatesthe human downshift periodto be anywhere from twelve totwenty-five feet, so if you owna store, he says, you never want to be next door to a bank: potential shoppersspeed up when they walk past a bank (since there'snothing to look at), and by the time they slow downthey've walked right past your business. Thedownshift factor also meansthat when potentialshoppers enter a store it'sgoing to take them from fiveto fifteen paces to adjust tothe light and refocus andgear down from walkingspeed to shopping speed-particularly if they've justhad to navigate atreacherous parking lot orhurry to make the light atFifty- seventh and Fifth.Paco calls that area insidethe door the DecompressionZone, and something he tellsclients over and over again isnever, ever put anything of value in that zone- notshopping baskets or tieracks or big promotionaldisplays- because no one isgoing to see it. Paco believesthat, as a rule of thumb,

customer interaction withany product or promotionaldisplay in theDecompression Zone willincrease at least thirty percent once it's moved to the back edge of the zone, andeven more if it's placed tothe right, because another of the fundamental rules of how human beings shop isthat upon entering a store- whether it's Nordstrom or K mart, Tiffany or the Gap-theshopper invariably andreflexively turns to the right.Paco believes in theexistence of the InvariantRight because he hasactually verified it. He hasput cameras in storestrained directly on thedoorway, and if you go to hisoffice, just above UnionSquare, where videocassettes and boxes of Super-eight film from all his work over the years arestacked in plasticTupperware containerspractically up to the ceiling,he can show you reel uponreel of grainy entryway video-customers striding inthe door, downshifting,refocussing, and then, againand again, making that littlehalf turn.Paco Underhill is a tall manin his mid-forties, partly bald, with a neatly trimmed beard and an engaging,almost goofy manner. He wears baggy khakis andshirts open at the collar, andgenerally looks like theacademic he might have beenif he hadn't been captivated,twenty years ago, by the ideasof the urban anthropologist William Whyte. It was Whyte who pioneered the use of time-lapse photography as atool of urban planning,putting cameras in parks andthe plazas in front of office buildings in midtownManhattan, in order todetermine what distinguisheda public space that workedfrom one that didn't. As aColumbia undergraduate, in1974, Paco heard a lecture on Whyte's work and, he recalls,left the room "walking on air."He immediately readeverything Whyte had written.He emptied his bank accountto buy cameras and film andmake his own home movie,about a pedestrian mall inPoughkeepsie. He took his"little exercise" to Whyte'sadvocacy group, the Projectfor Public Spaces, and wasoffered a job. Soon, however,it dawned on Paco that Whyte's ideas could be taken astep further-that the sametechniques he used toestablish why a plaza workedor didn't work could also beused to determine why a store worked or didn't work. Thus was born the field of retailanthropology, and, not longafterward, Paco foundedEnvirosell, which in just overfifteen years has counselledsome of the most familiarnames in American retailing,from Levi Strauss to Kinney,Starbucks, McDonald's,Blockbuster, AppleComputer, A.T. & T., and anumber of upscale retailersthat Paco would rather notname. When Paco gets anassignment, he and his staff set up a series of videocameras throughout the teststore and then back thecameras up with Envirosellstaffers-trackers, as they'reknown-armed withclipboards. Where thecameras go and how many trackers Paco deploysdepends on exactly what thestore wants to know aboutits shoppers. Typically,though, he might use sixcameras and two or threetrackers, and let the study run for two or three days, sothat at the end he wouldhave pages and pages of carefully annotated trackingsheets and anywhere from ahundred to five hundredhours of film. These days,given the expansion of his business, he might tapefifteen thousand hours in a year, and, given that he has been in operation since thelate seventies, he now has well over a hundredthousand hours of tape inhis library. Even in the bestof times, this would be a valuable archive. But today, with the retail business incrisis, it is a gold mine. Thetime per visit that theaverage American spends ina shopping mall was sixty-six minutes last year-downfrom seventy-two minutes in1992-and is the lowest

number ever recorded. Theamount of selling space per American shopper is now more than double what it was in the mid-seventies,meaning that profit marginshave never been narrower,and the costs of starting aretail business-and of failing-have never beenhigher. In the past few years,countless dazzling new retailing temples have been built along Fifth andMadison Avenues- Barneys,Calvin Klein, Armani, Valentino, Banana Republic,Prada, Chanel, Nike Town,and on and on-but it is anexplosion of growth basedon no more than a hunch, ahopeful multimillion-dollargamble that the way to break through is to provide theshopper with spectacle andmore spectacle. "Thearrogance is gone," MillardDrexler, the president andCEO of the Gap, told me."Arrogance makes failure.Once you think you know the answer, it's almostalways over." In such acompetitive environment,retailers don't just want toknow how shoppers behavein their stores. They have toknow. And who better to ask than Paco Underhill, who inthe past decade and a half has analyzed tens of thousands of hours of shopping videotape and, as aresult, probably knows moreabout the strange habits andquirks of the species Emptoramericanus than anyone elsealive?

Paco is considered theoriginator, for example, of what is known in the trade asthe butt-brush theory-or, asPaco calls it, more delicately,le facteur bousculade-whichholds that the likelihood of a woman's being convertedfrom a browser to a buyer isinversely proportional to thelikelihood of her being brushed on her behind whileshe's examining merchandise.Touch-or brush or bump or jostle-a woman on the behind when she has stopped to look at an item, and she will bolt. Actually, calling this a theory is something of a misnomer, because Paco doesn't offer any explanation for why womenreact that way, aside from venturing that they are "moresensitive back there." It'sreally an observation, basedon repeated and close analysisof his videotape library, thatPaco has transformed into aretailing commandment: a women's product that requiresextensive examination shouldnever be placed in a narrow aisle.Paco approaches the problemof the Invariant Right thesame way. Some retailthinkers see this as a subjectcrying out for interpretationand speculation. The designguru Joseph Weishar, forexample, argues, in hismagisterial "Design forEffective Selling Space," thatthe Invariant Right is afunction of the fact that we"absorb and digestinformation in the left partof the brain" and "assimilateand logically use thisinformation in the righthalf," the result being that we scan the store from left toright and then fix on anobject to the right"essentially at a 45 degreeangle from the point that weenter." When I asked Pacoabout this interpretation, heshrugged, and said hethought the reason wassimply that most people areright-handed. Uncoveringthe fundamentals of "why" isclearly not a pursuit thatengages him much. He is nota theoretician but anempiricist, and for him theimportant thing is that inamassing his huge library of in- store time-lapsephotography he has gainedenough hard evidence toknow how often and under what circumstances theInvariant Right is expressedand how to take advantageof it. What Paco likes are facts.They come tumbling out when he talks, and, becausehe speaks with a slighthesitation-lingering over thefirst syllable in, for example,"re-tail" or "de-sign"-hedraws you in, and you find yourself truly hanging on his words. "We have reached a

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