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Hardcover
Publisher: Amazon Remainders Account
Format: Bargain Price
The author of the international bestseller Why We Buy -- praised by The New York Times as "a book that gives this underrated skill the respect it deserves" -- now takes us to the mall, a place every American has experienced and has an opinion about.
Paco Underhill, the Margaret Mead of shopping, has run hundreds of research assignments in malls across the country (and in Tokyo and European capitals). He has visited them, observed his fellow mall-ers, looked long and hard for his car in mammoth parking lots, chatted up the staffers, gone hunting for jeans with adolescent girls and anniversary shopping with guys.
The result is a bright, ironic, funny, and shrewd portrait of the mall -- America's gift to personal consumption, its most powerful icon of global commercial muscle, the once new and now aging national town square, the place where we convene in our leisure time. Call of the Mall is about desire and buying lingerie, about why the same camel hair coat costs twice as much in the women's department as it does in the boys'. It's about why shoes, handbags, and cosmetics are clustered, why Cartier is next to cut-rate, and why the movie theater is hard to find. It's about the shopping mall as an exemplar of our commercial and social culture, the place where our young people have their first taste of social freedom, and where the rest of us compare notes. Call of the Mall examines how we use the mall, what it means, why it works when it does, and why it sometimes doesn't. Visiting the mall with Paco Underhill is a surprising and insightful tour through the American crossroads. Why We Buy changed the way we watch ourselves shop. Call of the Mall will deepen our understanding of how we live, work, play, and spend.
Paco Underhill has a genius for retail. As a follow-up to the bestseller Why We Buy, he has written an arch entertaining ethnography of the shopping mall. Energized by two dripping cinnabons, Underhill guides readers on a walking tour to encounter senior mall walkers, teen jean and hoodie shoppers, shoe fetishists, six second sales greeters, kiosk vendors and food court diners. He nails our ambivalence about indoor shopping saying, "the mall, like television, is an easy American target for self-loathing. We look at the mall and wonder: is this the best we could do?" He gets the devil in the details with wonderful riffs about global malls, parking spaces, the "free" gift with cosmetics, retail tribalism (Nordstrom versus Ann Taylor, Pac Sun versus Abercrombie) and why CD and bookstores have returned to city streets. But Underhill doesn't whine. When he critiques multiplex theatres, raunchy bathrooms or the absence of coatrooms, he also offers witty suggestions. For example, how to turn a well-appointed restroom into a profit center. Underhill is convinced that online shopping and fatigued boomer shoppers are leading to the "post-mall era." This kind of prediction makes The Call of the Mall a great read. It is a smart, observant meditation--one that suggests the past and the future of our shopping culture. --Barbara Mackoff
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| A Day At The Mall, Literally. --And It Is A Snooze |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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A genuine "So-what?" book. It's a conversational-like, easy-read edition that offers the mall weary absolutely no tips for easier buying, no hints on reducing time in lines, no suggestions for smarter spending or faster transactions. One diverting quote on the back cover from an author of another book claims: "Call of the Mall explains why we shop 'til we drop". Well. Not exactly. The book says we Do shop. Only we, evidentally, don't do enough of it.
This is the perfect guidebook for those in Retail 101. It blatantly shows students (et. al.) how they might cleverly separate shoppers from their hard-earned money. Period.
Move those clothing racks. Change the color layouts. Add big graphics to the walls. Put advertising wherever there used to be breathing space. Brighten the lights. Fill up that asile with goods. Beef up the window display. Put in a lively tv-screen and add some snappy music. Get bigger shopping carts. Plant a tree outside. And more. Lots more. --Sketchy directives dreamt up by author Underhill not to help make mall shopping a more pleasant, more efficient experience for all of us, but to make life easier for store managers and employees --not to mention to increase the "bottom line" for store owners, mall-meisters and name brand execs. This is all fine and good, but since I'm usually on the giving end of their profit margins, I note "me, the shopper" is what I thought this book was about.
Yet, if the reader craves a pallet load of thin retail selling-ideas, the book might be enlightening and useful. If malls, on the other hand, can make you irritated, tired, annoyed, restless, then this book is About you. --But take heart. The author has industrial strength ways and means to brighten up your shopping day...all in the hopes that you'll stay longer, walk further, shop more and leave larger dollar amounts at the mall-side checkouts.
For instance, he says that he and his (consulting) company, Envirosell, "have started to track (evidently personal) phone conversations that happen in mall stores...and their apparent effect on buying decisions." [Page 208] (Most interesting!) We can guess why; but How they gather the (private?) information, Underhill doesn't say. [If this is what shopping has come to, maybe we all ought to just stay home more.]
Casual, semi-insider store design and point-of-sale suggestions abound (as do the consumers' "So whats," to be sure). --But all this basic merchandising info does nothing for this shopper; and after awhile, reading about strategies and techniques aiming to reel in more and more of my cash gets really dull if not irritating. Page 176 holds a short passage typical of the entire read: "If you're selling high end goods, the rule is 'the fancier the store, the more definite the line between inside and outside [of the store]'." So?... [On page 75, though, is the one revealing line of the book that says it all: "An entrepreneurial approach to the well-appointed restroom could turn even this place into a profit center." (!!)]
What's in "Call of the Mall" that encourages me into my nearest goliath retail haven? Nothing. This sketchbook's got designs and details of buying and selling in the mall, but it's just not written for Mr. or Ms. Mall Shopper. In the end, this mostly understandable, sometimes interesting, quick-to-get-through consultant's plan-book is mostly drowsy reading right from a mall's parking lot, described in Chapter 1.
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| Disappointing followup to "Why We Buy" |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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Underhill's Why We Buy was required reading for my marketing class, and after opening it up, I was hooked by his research and insight into buying behaviors. By contrast, I struggled through 70 pages of Call of the Mall before coming across some of the more interesting aspects of what retailers could do differently. Overall the book presents few compelling insights; it almost feels that he used up all his juicy bits for the first book and really had to dig at the bottom of the barrel for this one.
Final word: Don't bother...
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| Fun examples, but limited take-aways and too NYC-loving |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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I teach Consumer Marketing and love social science interpretations of 'real world' behavior. Hence I picked up "Call to the Mall" with personal and professional excitement. Overall, I was disappointed. On the plus side, there are some wonderful examples of behavior that we all do or have seen. However, the is sadly little data to back these up for being more than informed opinions of the author or his companions. He has a company that does this, he must have access to great descriptive stats that would increases both the richness and credibility of his observations. The breezy style makes the book fun and easy to read but I found Mr. Underhill strong personal bias toward urban (especially NYC)shopping repeatedly annoying. I have lived in 8 states in both urban (including Manhattan) and suburban settings and the urban (even NYC) shopping isn't all glorious and the mall shopping all tacky, although you might think so after this book. It reminded me of my students in NYC who had so little breadth of experience that they thought all the world wished it could be like NYC. Finally, the walk-through-the-mall structure of the book emphasizes its lack of themes or theses. Not clear what you take-away about understanding shopping behavior, other than Mr. Underhill's opinion that malls are tacky, out-dated and not well designed (very possibly true but not supported by evidence other than his observations). While I understand that he is not an academic, he is a world-renowned expert on descriptive shopping behavior so I was looking for more richness of analysis and insight beyond the examples.
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| A Controvertial Review of Shopping Malls |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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"Call Of The Mall" follows on from the most fascinating, entertaining and useful retail research book ever written, "Why We Buy. The Science of Shopping" which is a must read for everyone involved with retail.
"Call Of The Mall" is also easy to read, though it has far more of Paco Underhill's opinions and far less actual research to back up his conclusions. It examines how Americans use the mall, what it means, why it works when it does and why it often doesn't work at all well.
I have the feeling with this book that Paco Underhill has been reading too much of his publicity and now believes he is a witty, entertaining writer. So, in some ways it's a bit of a let down. However, for anyone involved in a management role within shopping centres it's still a `must read'.
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| It's Alright |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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I had to read this book for a consumer-behavior class. The subject matter is so interesting and full of unique little insights about our consumer culture, but Underhill gives only a cursory analysis; in reality, most of the book seems to be a mechanism for name-dropping clients and touting the glorious magic that is...Paco Underhill.
Underhill's writing style is flippant and annoying, but having said that, it is a quick and easy read and a good intro to anyone interested in the topic.
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