Why We Buy (11 page)

A final note: What I don't understand is why the fast-food business has not invented and provided a car bib. Something that allows you to eat that burger without spilling pickles and ketchup on that new tie of yours or dropping that stray french fry in between the seats. Something for one of those business-school guys to ponder.

A
s we've seen, the simplest aspects of humanity—our physical abilities and limitations—have quite a bit of say in how we shop. But nothing as interesting as shopping is ever quite so simple. We all move through the same environments, but no two of us respond to them exactly alike. This sign may be tastefully rendered, perfectly legible, exquisitely positioned, but you read the sign and I do not. The store flows beautifully, and all the merchandise is easily within my grasp, except that I hate buying clothing and would rather be fishing. No shopping baskets were ever more conveniently located, only you're strapped for cash right now, or you're just constitutionally incapable of buying more than two books at a time.

Certainly we're all aware of how shopping means different things to different people at different times. We use shopping as therapy, reward, bribery, pastime, an excuse to get out of the house, a way to troll for potential loved ones, entertainment, a form of education or even worship, a way to kill time. There are compulsive shoppers doing serious damage to their bank accounts and credit ratings who use shopping as
a cry for help. (Then they shop around for twelve-step programs.) And how many disreputable public figures end up arrested for shoplifting small, inexpensive items? It seems we get two or three a year, always in Florida.

In the '80s, Eastern European émigrés who came to America were awestruck by the abundance on display in a typical suburban supermarket. The stores symbolized how free-market democracy comes down to simple freedom of choice—lots and lots of choices. It was in a supermarket that I, too, had an emotionally cathartic shopping experience. This was maybe twenty years ago, a time when it began to seem as though Envirosell might succeed as an ongoing concern. Up until that point, though, it was an open question—I was borderline broke all the time, working like a dog but plowing every nickel I had back into the company. Things were tight: If I had a meeting in Florida, for instance, I would take the last flight of the day down there to get the cheapest ticket, arriving in the middle of the night. Then I'd pick up my cheap rental car, drive to my destination, curl up my six-foot-four-inch frame as best I could, doze lightly in the car, shave and brush my teeth in a gas station bathroom, and go to my appointment trying my best to impersonate a successful research firm founder.
Tight.
Anyway, on the day in question it became clear that I and my company were going to be all right. And on that day I just happened to visit the Pathmark supermarket near South Street Seaport in New York. Standing in the imported goods aisle, it suddenly hit me that I could afford to buy anything there I wanted. If, say, I wished to try some of the English ginger preserves I remembered from my youth, I could just pick up a jar and pay for it, heedless of the fact that it cost maybe
four or five bucks.
No more cheap Welch's grape jelly. At age thirty-five, I no longer had to sweat over my food budget, I realized, and at that moment, I—a six-foot-four, 220-pound, bald, bearded guy—began to cry. Right there in front of all those imported jellies, jams and preserves, I wept with relief and happiness, emotions that had come forth thanks to a supermarket. From that day on, my breakfast of choice at least 150 mornings a year consisted of obscenely expensive ginger preserves and organic peanut butter spread on an English muffin and downed with a cup of strong coffee.

But doesn't
everybody
cry in supermarkets? Much of our work at Envirosell has to do with identifying differences in shoppers, trying to come up with types and generalizations that might be useful to the retailers and others who control our shopping spaces. Not surprisingly, in a world where “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” is a commonplace, we pay close attention to how men and women behave differently in stores. Some of the distinctions are what you'd expect—women are better at it, men are loose cannons. But as men and women (and relations between them) change, their shopping behaviors do, too, which will have huge implications for American business.

The other great distinction we study has to do with the age of the shopper. Once upon a time, children in stores were seen but not heard. Those days are long gone, and now even the smallest among them must be considered and accommodated in the retail equation. At the other extreme, older shoppers are also more important than ever, if only because there are more of them, and they have a lot of money to spend and time to spend it. Their presence will transform how products are sold in the twenty-first century. Enormous cultural and demographic shifts are coming into play; in the four chapters that follow, we'll see how shoppers differ, and how those differences are reflected in the world of shopping.

M
en and women differ in just about every other way, so why shouldn't they shop differently, too? The conventional wisdom on male shoppers is that they don't especially like to do it, which is why they don't do much of it. It's a struggle just to get them to be patient company for a woman while she shops. As a result, the entire shopping experience—from packaging design to advertising to merchandising to store design and fixturing—is geared toward the female shopper.

Or so the traditional world of retail maintains. Baloney. Although women are increasingly reaching high-level business positions, we live in a world that is owned by men, designed by men and managed by men, yet somehow they expect women to participate. That they don't get women is a given; that they don't do so well with the guys either is pathetic. Here are the two basic building blocks: Guys are genetically disposed to be hunters, so they walk to the woods and are unsuccessful unless they can kill something reasonably quickly and drag it back home and through the mudroom. Women are gatherers who get immense
pleasure out of the act of looking. Thus, two women can spend the day at the mall, buy nothing and have a wonderful time.

Women do have a greater affinity for what we think of as “shopping”—walking at a relaxed pace through stores, examining merchandise, comparing products and values, interacting with sales staff, asking questions, trying things on and ultimately making purchases. Most acquisitioning traditionally falls to women, and they usually do it willingly—even when shopping for the mundane necessities, even when the experience brings no particular pleasure, women tend to do it in dependable, agreeable fashion. Historically, women were the culture's everyday purchasing agents and took pride in their ability to shop prudently and well. In a study we ran of baby products, women interviewed insisted that they knew the price of products by heart, without even having to look. (Upon further inquiry, we discovered that they were mostly wrong.) As women's roles change, so does their shopping behavior—they're becoming a lot more like men in that regard—but they're still the primary buyers in the American marketplace.

Men, in comparison, are more reckless, less poetical. We've timed enough shoppers to know that men always move faster than women through a store's aisles. Men spend less time looking, too. In many settings it's hard to get them to look at anything they hadn't intended to buy. They usually don't like asking where things are, or any other questions, for that matter. (They shop the way they drive.) If a man can't find the section he's looking for, he'll wheel about once or twice, then give up and leave the store without ever asking for help. You can see him just shut down.

You'll see a man move impatiently through a store to the section he wants, pick something up, and then, almost abruptly, he's ready to buy, having taken little apparent joy in the process of finding. A classic example was watching some older guys shopping for Dockers—the Levi Strauss line of basic khakis and chinos. The image of the guy racing to the Dockers wall, finding a pair that matched his specs—thirty-four-inch waist and thirty-two-inch inseam—and turning and almost running to the register is pretty commonplace. It's as if the sheer fact of being
in the store is a threat to his masculinity. It's funny that stores like Cabela's, REI and even the bricks-and-mortar versions of L.L.Bean make it much easier for older guys to shop for belts, pants and underwear, since they're surrounded by the trappings of fishing, hunting and outdoor exercise. Another example is the Harley-Davidson dealer, where not only do middle-aged guys shop for clothes, but you can sell them stuff for their kids, too.

But when a typical guy is shopping, you've practically got to get out of his way because otherwise he'll flatten you. When a man takes clothing into a dressing room, the only thing that stops him from buying it is if it doesn't fit. Women, on the other hand, try things on only as part of the consideration process, and garments that fit just fine may still be rejected on other grounds. In one study, we found that 65 percent of male shoppers who tried something on bought it, as opposed to 25 percent of female shoppers. This is a good argument for positioning fitting rooms nearer the men's department than the women's, if they are shared accommodations. If they are not, men's dressing rooms should be near the entrance and very clearly marked, because if he has to search for it, he may just decide it's not worth the trouble.

Here's another statistical comparison: Eighty-six percent of women look at price tags when they shop. Only 72 percent of men do. For a man, ignoring the price tag is almost a measure of his virility. As a result, men are far more easily upgraded than are women shoppers. They are also far more suggestible than women—men seem so anxious to get out of the store that they'll say yes to almost anything.

Now, a shopper such as that could be seen as more trouble than he's worth. But he could also be seen as a potential source of profits, especially given his lack of discipline. Either way, men now do more purchasing than ever before. And that figure will continue to grow. As they stay single longer than ever, they learn to shop for things their fathers never had to buy. And because many marry women who work as long and hard as they do, they will be forced to shoulder more of the burden of shopping. The manufacturers and retailers and display designers who pay attention to male ways, and are willing to adapt the shopping experience to them, will have an edge in the coming decades.

The great traditional arena for male shopping behavior has always been the supermarket. It's here, with thousands of products all within easy reach, that you can witness the carefree abandon and restless lack of discipline for which the gender is known.

In one supermarket study, we counted how many shoppers came armed with lists. Almost all of the women had them. Less than a quarter of the men did. Any wife who's watching the family budget knows better than to send her inexperienced husband to the supermarket unchaperoned. Giving him a vehicle to commandeer, even if it is just a shopping cart, only emphasizes the potential for guyness in the experience. Throw a couple of kids in with Dad and you've got a lethal combination; he's notoriously bad at saying no when there's grocery acquisitioning to be done. Part of being Daddy is being the provider, after all. It goes to the heart of a man's self-image.

I've spent hundreds of hours of my life watching men moving through supermarkets. One of my favorite video moments starred a dad carrying his little daughter on his shoulders. In the snacks aisle, the girl gestures toward the animal crackers display. Dad grabs a box off the shelf, opens it, and hands it up—without even a thought to the fact that his head and shoulders are about to be dusted with cookie crumbs. It's hard to imagine Mom in such a wanton scenario. Another great lesson in male shopping came about watching a man and his two small sons pass through the cereal aisle. When the boys plead for their favorite brand, he pulls down a box and instead of carefully opening it along the reclosable tab, he just rips the top, knowing full well that once the boys start in, there won't be any need to reclose it.

Supermarkets are places of high-impulse buying for both sexes—fully 60 to 70 percent of purchases there were unplanned, grocery industry studies have shown us. But men are particularly suggestible to the entreaties of children as well as eye-catching displays.

There's another profligate male behavior that invariably shows itself at supermarkets, something we see over and over on video we shoot at the registers: The man almost always pays. Especially when a man and woman are shopping together, he insists on whipping out his wad and forking it over, lest the cashier mistakenly think it's the
woman of the house who's bringing home the bacon. No wonder that retailers commonly call men wallet carriers, or that the conventional wisdom is sell to the woman, close to the man. Because while the man may not love the experience of shopping, he gets a definite thrill from the experience of paying. It allows him to feel in charge even when he isn't. Stores that sell prom gowns depend on this. Generally, when Dad's along, the girl will get a pricier frock than if just Mom were there with her.

One of my favorite stores is American Girl Place, which has to be one of the best engines ever invented to take money out of Daddy's pocket. For anyone who doesn't know what American Girl Place is, it's a doll store, where dolls are themed to moments in American history, with skin tone and hair color to match, as well as an era-appropriate name, like Addy or Felicity, plus a brief bio. You can buy matching outfits for both the doll and your nine-year-old. The store also features a beauty parlor where you can get your doll's hair done, a doll hospital, a café with a special seat where your doll can join you for tea, and even a theater where the story behind each doll is dramatized. Add on books and magazines, and the average visitor has dropped a couple of hundred bucks. The café has five seatings a day and most weekends are booked out six months in advance. It's the dream birthday present for many American eight-or nine-year-old girls to convince their parents to take them to American Girl Place for the weekend. There are now three stores—the original in Chicago, followed by New York and Los Angeles. The only improvement I can think of would be an American Girl Place Hotel, or maybe an American Girl Place Floor at a nearby hotel complete with doll beds and nightgowns. I love taking foreign visitors there. The question we debate is whether a French Girl Place or a Japanese Girl Place would be as successful a way of getting money out of Daddy's pocket as its U.S. counterpart.

In certain categories, men shoppers put women to shame. We ran a study for a store where 17 percent of the male customers we interviewed said they visited the place more than once a week! Almost one quarter of the men there said they had left the house that day with no intention of visiting the store—they just found themselves wandering
in out of curiosity. The fact that it was a computer store may have had something to do with it, of course. Computer hardware and software have taken the place of cars and stereo equipment as the focus of male love of technology and gadgetry. Clearly, most of the visits to the store were information-gathering forays. On the videotape, we watched the men reading intently the software packaging and any other literature or signage available. The store was where men bought software, but it was also where they did most of their learning about it. This underscores another male shopping trait: Just as they hate to ask directions from sales staff, they like to get their information firsthand, preferably from written materials, instructional videos or computer screens.

A few years back we ran a study for a wireless phone provider that was developing a prototype retail store. And we found that men and women used the place in very different ways. Women would invariably walk right up to the sales desk and ask staffers questions about the phones and the various deals being offered. Men, however, went directly to the phone displays and the signs that explained the agreements. They then took brochures and application forms and left the store—all without ever speaking to an employee. When these men returned to the store, it was to sign up. The women, though, on average required a third visit to the store, and more consultation, before they were ready to close.

Women's and men's roles, of course, are changing. In 2008, the overwhelming majority of students attending institutions of higher learning was female. And it's not just undergraduate education, law school and medical school; women now dominate almost every graduate program except engineering and math. While income disparity is still biased toward men and the glass ceiling is still an obstacle in most professions, never have women had more money of their own than they do right now.

But for the most part, men are still the ones who take the lead when shopping for cars (though women have a big say in most new-car purchases), and men and women perform the division of labor you'd expect when buying for the home: She buys anything that goes inside, and he
buys everything that goes outside—mower and other gardening and lawn-care equipment, barbecue grill, water hose and so on.

But let's put those historic roles into some sort of demographic perspective. In the 2002 U.S. Census, only 24 percent of American households had a mother, a father and dependent children. Roughly 15 percent of households consisted of a single parent raising his or her kids. That leaves a huge 60 percent of American households with no kids (some childless, some empty nesters), and the rest nontraditional: roommates, adult kids living with their parents, singles and so on. The basic idea of what we sell to whom is still valid, but paying attention to the nontraditional buyers of everything has never been more important. Roughly half the cars on the road in North America are driven by women. Yet the car dealership remains one of the most hated destinations for women shoppers.

One of the most telling disconnects is in housing, where almost all new homes built in the past ten years have been based around the concept of the nuclear family: one master bedroom and a couple of smaller kiddie rooms. If you have a home that's configured for a nontraditional living unit—for example, with two master bedroom suites—it will sell faster and at a premium.

All across the world it takes two incomes to live a middle-class life. In 1965 when my father bought a home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, that home cost approximately his annual salary. He made forty thousand dollars a year and the house cost the same. Today if anyone lives in a house that's equal to his or her annual income, I don't know whether to be envious or sympathetic. That said, the decision-making process of where we spend our money is in flux.

Even when men aren't shopping, they figure prominently into the experience. As I mentioned earlier, we know that across the board, how much customers buy is a direct result of how much time they spend in a store. And our research has shown over and over that when a woman is in a store with a man, she'll spend less time there than when she's alone or with another woman, or even with children. Here's the actual breakdown of average shopping time from a study we performed at one branch of a national housewares chain: