Cruel and Unusual Punishment

In Malcolm Gladwell’s article, The Science of Shopping, we can begin to see the space of shopping in a new light. The organization and planning that is embedded into the layout of a single store can be derived from countless hours of market research and experimentation. By carefully observing Paco Underhill in his daily routine and learning about his history, Gladwell highlights the almost dictator like circumstance created by the pairing of retail moguls such as GAP and Bannana Republic with planners like Paco and NBBJ. In the world of the retail developer, the consumer becomes a testing supply or a lab rat in which they can reorganize a maze of jeans and relocate the cheese in order to squeeze every last cent out of “the wallet,” as Underhill calls the buying figure. The studies of such firms not only analyze what can be considered the basics retail consumerism, such as target population or percentage of visitors to buyers, but they go as far as to analyze the interactions between a father-son shopping pair to a family of five shopping team. They instruct retail developers in the placement of goods and they characterize the shopper in classes on intent and classes of intelligence. They distinguish certain zones of the shopping space and derive specific rules and regulations that must be followed with the singular intent of capitalizing on the naive public of working citizens. Prior to reading this article I was aware that such analysis was present in the retail industry. However, I was not prepared to learn of the details that encompass what is seemingly an inexact and ruthless science. I found it hard to believe that such rules were determined by mere assumption and loose observation and more surprising was the fact that companies are paying what seems to be very large amount for what seems to be common sense.

On the other hand, I believe that the Underhill’s use of the video recording and his analysis of public movement can be a beneficial tool in the world of architecture. Through the study of human circulation and gathering trends, architects can produce spaces that are directly in response to human function and flow.