If you’ve ever gotten lost in a shopping centre, you shouldn’t blame yourself as the place is designed to confuse you, experts say.
David Janotten from the Metropolitan Buildings Department told the Sydney Morning Herald that the escalators were installed in stores “simply to disorient people”, saying it was just one of many ploys retailers use to get customers to spend more money.
“Sniff medicine”
Having studied retail practices, Janotten noticed that “there are always extra escalator queues” to distract shoppers and get them to “spend more money,” the paper reported. This is to disorient customers and “slow them down enough” so that they “look at nearby items and are distracted from their goal.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape the echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news and analysis from different perspectives.
Subscribe and save
Sign up for our free weekly newsletter
From our morning breaking news bulletins to our weekly Good News newsletter, we’ll deliver the week’s best stories straight to your inbox.
From our morning breaking news bulletins to our weekly Good News newsletter, we’ll deliver the week’s best stories straight to your inbox.
During a visit to Sydney’s Westfield Parramatta, Janotten was standing next to an escalator when he noticed another one at a right angle. “There’s always one escalator a little outside the circuit, so [shoppers] “You’re like, ‘Oh my God, where am I now?’ It’s confusing,” he explained.
Experts say nothing has “revolutionised shopping” and “consolidated” the role of shopping centres as much as the invention of the escalator, introduced in the 1850s to allow customers to get to higher floors “with ease”.
According to London Walks, when Harrods introduced it, “nervous customers” were “served with brandy from above to cheer them up after their ‘ordeal'”, while customers who were “overwhelmed with joy” were handed snuff.
In the 1940s, a brochure from Otis, a manufacturer of escalators and elevators, said that elevators were made for “mission-driven” people who knew what they wanted and where to find it and would buy it, while escalators were designed to “lure” customers with their “smooth, continuous motion” and encourage casual shoppers to browse the various items, inciting impulse purchases.
Clever tactics
Escalators aren’t the only carefully designed feature of the shopping experience to siphon money: shopping centres have few clocks, for “manipulative reasons”, Metro says. Their absence “makes time feel like it evaporates”, so a “20-minute in and out” can “easily turn into hours of shopping”.
It’s a “carefully crafted strategy deeply rooted in consumer psychology” that aims to “extend visits and ultimately spend more”, psychologist Laura Gaige told Metro.
According to Start-Up Talkie, the mall’s “extremely limited number of windows” helps it “feel like an entirely different world,” and the car park is intentionally made to be “intimidating,” so even if you manage to park, you’re “likely to stick around for a little longer” because “architectural challenges make it harder for you to go back to get your car.”
It’s also an “open secret” that shops and supermarkets “use techniques to get people to spend more”, according to Metro, with it being “commonplace” to make shopping trolleys larger so shoppers can pack more into them, and placing more expensive items at eye level as a “long-standing habit”.
Dr Katherine Janson Boyd, from Anglia Ruskin University, told the Mirror that the most “traditional approach” used by supermarkets is to use bread or bread-like scents. “Often these are artificial scents,” she said.
Source link
