How Retail Stores are Shaped by our Behavior
I feel like I grew up in retail establishments. Throughout my childhood, my mother owned small grooming shops: sometimes as a family business with her two sisters, sometimes on her own. I often got on and off the bus from school at these shops, bookending my days. My first jobs were in these shops, and I went on to work in grooming and other retail establishments well into my 20’s. I enjoyed drawing on those memories as I worked through the chapter on retail today.
There are three basic pieces that work together in a retail store: the product or service, the physical environment, and store operations. There are, of course, different types of stores with different characteristics, which I won’t map out here. I could talk a bit about product assortments, etc., but I think it’s more interesting to talk about the changing landscape of retail. It will be no surprise that in the last decade, online sales have increased. Sixty percent of U.S. consumer spending now happens on mobile devices, from what I understand. Department stores and some other retail establishments are pretty vulnerable. One only has to look at the giant mall carcasses scattered across the landscape to see that.
Service and retail establishments like pet groomers are a bit more resilient. Some think malls might have a bit of a revival as people are spending more on experiences now, and malls were an experience. I personally think malls would have done better if there had been some things there that weren’t strictly about purchasing or consuming products. Movie theaters and arcades filled this void a bit, but they didn’t provide opportunity for connection.
People are buying experiences now, and it takes more than just a product to get them out of the house. Retailers are dealing with this in different ways. Some make shopping itself an experience. Others offer curated assortments of products, add services, or blend online and in-person experiences using tools like augmented reality. Marketers focus on big-picture strategy, such as making the purchase process itself feel meaningful. They also look closely at the physical space. Concepts like retail atmospherics and visual merchandising involve decisions about floor plans, displays, and other sensory details that influence customer behavior.
It may seem like stores are simply designed to influence our behavior, but if you zoom out, you realize that marketers first studied our behavior to learn how to influence it. The very nature of a marketer’s tactics is shaped by how we act, not the other way around.
