SHOPPING
. 4
UNIT 1 HOW SHOPS EXPLOIT PEOPLES MENTALITY TO INCREASE SALES 5
UNIT 2 PROBLEMS WITH THINGS PEOPLE BUY.. 9
.. 17
: How shops exploit peoples mentality to increase sales Problems with things people buy.
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UNIT 1
HOW SHOPS EXPLOIT PEOPLES
MENTALITY TO INCREASE SALES
VOCABULARY
| a swarm | ; ; |
| to swarm | ; |
| to exploit | |
| to fill a store | |
| to persuade | ; |
| to stock smt | - |
| to encourage | ; |
| an item | |
| to force smb to do smt | - - |
| tempting goods | |
| to enhance | , |
| a herd | ; |
| a customer | ; |
| a cart | |
| radio frequency | |
| a tag | , , |
| a bar code | |
| a trolley | |
| to relay | ; |
| a discount | |
| a chain of shops | |
| sales data | |
| a department store a retailer | , |
| like-minded | , |
| a consumer |
TEXT
Swarming the shelves
A trip to the supermarket may not seem like an exercise in psychological warfare but it is. Shopkeepers know that filling a store with the aroma of freshly baked bread makes people feel hungry and persuades them to buy more food than they had intended. Stocking the most expensive products at eye level makes them sell faster than cheaper but less visible competitors. Now researchers are investigating how swarm intelligence (that is, how ants, bees or any social animal, including humans, behave in a crowd) can be used to influence what people buy.
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At a recent conference on the simulation of adaptive behaviour in Rome, Dr Usmani, a computer scientist from Princeton University, described a new way to increase impulse buying using this phenomenon. Supermarkets already encourage shoppers to buy things they did not realize they wanted: for instance, by placing everyday items such as milk and eggs at the back of the store, forcing shoppers to walk past other tempting goods to reach them. Dr Usmani and Ronaldo Menezes of the Florida Institute of Technology set out to enhance this tendency to buy more by playing on the herd instinct. The idea is that, if a certain product is seen to be popular, shoppers are likely to choose it too. The challenge is to keep customers informed about what others are buying.
Enter smart-cart technology. In Dr Usmanis supermarket every product has a radio frequency tag, a sort of barcode that uses radio waves to transmit information, and every trolley has a scanner that reads this information and relays it to a central computer. As a customer walks past a shelf of goods, a screen on the shelf tells him how many people currently in the shop have chosen that particular product. If the number is high, he is more likely to select it too.
Dr Usmanis swarm-moves model appeals to supermarkets because it increases sales without the need to give people discounts. And it gives shoppers the satisfaction of knowing that they bought the right product that is, the one everyone else bought. The model has not yet been tested widely in the real world, mainly because radio frequency identification technology is new and has only been installed experimentally in some supermarkets. But Dr Usmani says that both Wal-Mart1 in America and Tesco2 in Britain are interested in his work, and testing will be done soon.
In Japan a chain of shops called RanKing RanQueen has been ordering its products according to sales data from department stores and research companies. The shops sell only the most popular items in each product category, and their sales are increasing. Icosystem, a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also aims to exploit this knowledge and experience to improve sales.
And also the usage of this psychology is potent on the internet. Online retailers such as Amazon are adept at telling shoppers which products are popular with like-minded consumers. Even in the privacy of your home, you can still be part of the swarm.
1. Wal-Mart one of a group of US shops that sell many different kinds of goods at low prices.
2. Tesco one of a group of supermarkets, selling mainly food but also many others products for the house, found in most large British towns and cities.
