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Secrets of Shopping

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Submitted By AudriJ94
Words 1192
Pages 5
Caught your eye yet? :
The connection of how spending money comes and its tricky disguises. Ever walked in to a store and saw that huge highlighter colored sign announcing “Big Blowout SALE”? They are pulling you in with things that attract you the most. From posters, human advertising, to the most innocent thing, the Barbie Doll, they are catching your eye and reeling you in and you’re unaware. Many businesses have learned the “Science” of how to arrange items so they may catch your attention. Paco Underhill, a retail anthropologist and an urban geographer, studies shopping behavior and has become valuable guides to store managers who look for the best ways to sell items. I am shocked to know that there are people who watch others for a living. As you approach a store look around and see if there is someone suspicious. Look around to see if you are being watched. Have you ever felt as if you were being watched? That is because they are watching you! Everything you are doing in the store is being observed. Strange is it? Yes but that is someone’s job. What you pick out and how you take in the item is all a part of their plan. Your choices matter in a study that you have no idea about. Your facial expression, happiness, and your disappointment makes a big deal also. The Credit Card Barbie is another marketing disguise. Barbie is, in a way advertising to younger age group. This is catching the eyes of your children and showing the fun and happy side spending money and shopping. The toy encourages irresponsible spending. Catching the eyes of elderly, adults, teenagers, and children and pursuing them to buy the item has become the main priority of store owners. They are finding more advanced ways that can draw in customers. The way customers observe things they may like is in a way being used against you. These two articles compare because they are both temptations. The perspective of the authors was to tell and show you how you are being lured in. Credit Card Barbie is a perfect example that shows how the real life marketing businesses makes innocent gestures of like into cruel marketing schemes. The article breaks down exactly how an expert observes how consumers engage and interact while in the space of consuming. The way a person looks at an item, to the amount of time they spend looking at an item, to exactly what they buy. Purchasers’ for example, spent an average of eleven minutes and twenty-seven seconds in the store. Non purchasers spent two minutes and thirty –six seconds in the store. We are being watched carefully and closely. Barbie holding the credit with a smile encourages shopping. The maker of the Barbie with a credit card is targeting smaller kids. To get to a younger generation, they use what attracts them. Girls are especially attracted when seeing credit card Barbie, for one, Barbie is a young girls weakness, shopping added to Barbie is a combo deal. This would attract the children, which would attract the parents, and leads to spending money. This will encourage young girls to pressure parents into getting them a Barbie Credit Card so they can go shopping like Barbie. Barbie Fashion Fever Shopping Boutique Play set, which lets Barbie fans set up their own store and use a “Fashion Fever” credit card to buy Barbie clothes and accessories. However, “Once the credit card balance hits zero, it will reset so you can continue to shop.” Say what? That’s teaching young girls that you can rack up your credit card with no consequences. They are using all kinds of tricks to get into your pocket. Every single detail of your shopping experience; the placement of every shelf, box, sign, and restroom, the background music, color of paint on the wall, words the staff use to greet you is a precisely orchestrated merchant-customer dance designed to achieve maximum sales results. We as consumers seem to look for things without being aware of who is watching. There is a constant cycle of observation, target, set up, sale, and repeat. There is a lot of things in the world that are meant for a certain type of people. Consumers manage to fall in the trap every time. A lot of things go unnoticed. The makers are always looking for the next best way to pull your eyes to their store. In the shopping centers there is a battle of who can catch the attention and who can make the sale. This has become a consumerism boom. No one is safe. You have no clue when and where youre being watched. People who observe the way people shop makes it hard to dodge because they are getting stronger ways to make you notice things in the store. The stores are advancing with products and slogans that sound good to pull you in. I believe that there is no way to get away from this. I have fallen short of being dragged into a “DEAL”. They are on the same page. He marketer, business managers, and producers work together to get the products sold. From food, clothes, cigarettes, hair accessories to band aids we are pulled in by basically everything we consume. Because the scheme is so successful, it goes unnoticed. People really think they are getting good deals. Consumers they are receiving the “BEST” products when they really aren’t. There is no way to assure that this plan is false but the method is definitely TRUE. Paco Underhill happens to be a man who make money off the way we, as human, live our daily lives and how we spend our money. He observes us shares our behavior with those who need it the most. The businesses are gunning for us and they are playing mind games with us. This makes me want to go in the store and stare and watch the people I am around. Anyone could be observing me as I am shopping and going about my business. Everyone should take a toll to how they shop and know that its being used against you in a way you have no clue of. The stores are like a science lab, you are the lab rat. Every aspect from when you enter to the store to when you leave is you chemical and reaction and you won’t even know that you are a part of this crazy and mysterious “EXPERIMENT”. Next time you’re in the store, don’t fall for the trap. Consumerism is game and we are the game pieces. Your being observed, can you tell?

Works Cited
02,April. “Parent Give Credit Card Barbie a Low Rating.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 02 Apr. 1998. Web. 23 Mar. 2013.
Gladwell, Malcolm. “”The Science of Shopping”” Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writer. By Sonia Maasik. 7TH ed. Boston: Bedford, 1997. 97-104. Print
Maasik, Sonia. "Credit Card Barbie." Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. 7th ed. Boston : Bedford, 1997. 116-117. Print.

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