Outsmarting the Retail Researchers at the Shopping Mall

Retail today has been boiled down to an exact science. Go to any successful shopping mall store today, and you can be pretty sure that they hire a retail researcher to get and to remain on top of their game. Retail researchers earn their stripes studying thousands of shoppers as they go about stores trying to spend the most money for the least satisfaction (it could be the other way around too). These are people who sit and think through the night and over the weekends about how exactly they can get into the heads of shoppers and find what buttons they have that they’ll let them push to get them to buy. Nothing you see in any store these days is just set that way because it's pretty or convenient. If store designers believed that putting baby diapers on a shelf 10 feet up would sell more of them, that's what they would do.

Fortunately, it's a free country; it isn't just the retail researchers who can try to get under in your head; you could do the same thing to them - with reverse psychology. Take your average fun and youthful clothing store at the shopping mall. Now people have got pretty used to seeing labels on clothing that say something about how they're made in China or Sri Lanka or Vietnam. Retail researchers note that customers don't really prefer imports; it makes them feel uncomfortable that these products could be made in sweatshops in poor conditions. If they had some way to lie to customers about where those clothes are made, it would sell a lot more of them. So stores often buy clothes from whatever sweatshop they want, but require that the clothes be shipped without any labels on. They then sew on their own labels with no mention of the country of origin. All they do is to make sure that there is no appearance of any foreign script or anything. This makes customers just assume that the clothing is domestic. It's your job in there to not fall for these tricks

Any shopping mall you visit, you're bound to find about three dozen twofer offers at every clothing store around. If you're not familiar with the kind of prices a store usually has, you really shouldn't fall for these promotions. To begin with, these twofer offers could just be outright lies. But even if they weren't that, they are still aimed at getting you to spend a lot more than you originally intended. They want you to buy ten even if you just wanted to buy two. You can't be swayed by this kind of temptation. You can't consider it to be saving money if you’re spending more than you intended to.

Store designers at any shopping mall will always use subtle psychology to get you shopping for the most expensive products they have. The clearance items are usually in the back of the store where there are no staff and where everything is quite messy. The expensive things in the store are usually to your right when you enter the store, and are more brightly lit. They are placed to the right because most people are right-handed and that's where they will feel comfortable having. Stay warned, and you could come out with your wallet intact.