Why We Buy

by Paco Underhill

  Even in fast-food restaurants, males and females have different spatial requirements. Without much consideration, men choose tables up front, where they have a good view of the busiest part of the room. Women will take a moment or two to shop for where they’ll down their Big Macs, and then they gravitate toward the rear, to tables that afford a little privacy. In fact, women aren’t all that crazy about going into fast-food restaurants alone. They make up a large percentage of fast-food diners who go through the drive-thru and eat in their cars in the restaurant parking lot.

  You can really see the female shopping reverie in stores where women dominate—for instance, at the greeting card shop. There, women aren’t merely fulfilling obligations, they’re searching for authentic emotional expression. Women will devote quite a bit of time to studying card after card to find the one that speaks their hearts. Card stores should therefore feel like places where the emotional life reigns. A few years ago Hallmark hired an architect with a lot of experience designing department stores to redo its retail spaces. She created a very stylish look, using lots of marble and other expensive materials, but the overall feeling was colder and more elegant than Hallmark customers had been used to. They must have missed their familiar warm and fuzzy environments; in response to the redesign, shopping time dropped.

  Card stores must be designed to allow quiet, unhurried contemplation, meaning that aisles should be wide enough to allow room for readers and for those just passing by. Aisles must also be wide enough for baby strollers. Adjacencies should be planned rather than accidental: You don’t want to be trying to find the perfect message of condolence and have your concentration broken by the woman next to you laughing at the dirty fortieth-birthday cards. Other important display issues also come to the fore in card stores. Women buy cards only after picking up, opening and reading a great many of them. But the merchandise is fragile—easily folded, torn or soiled. It amazes me that there is still no widely used display system that would allow shoppers to read sample cards but not actually touch the merchandise. Also, in card stores the displays usually start at about a foot or so off the floor and rise to about six feet high. There are two problems with that: One, the low cards are too far down to be seen without stooping; and two, the low cards are too easily touched by grubby-fingered small children accompanying their mothers. If the whole display were raised by a foot, the problems would be solved. Even if the highest cards were seven feet off the floor, they would be within reach of anyone taller than five feet.

  The other great arena where female shopping behaviors are on display is in cosmetics. Whether it’s in a department store’s impossibly glamorous cosmetics bazaar or a chain drugstore’s wall display of lipsticks and eye shadow, this is where a woman in jeans and a sweater can be transformed into a princess just by testing a few items and pouting into a mirror. This is as public as a private art form ever gets. There’s a good reason cosmetics are usually stocked along a wall or in their own sheltered area—this is where women let their hair down, literally and figuratively. They need a little privacy if they’re going to cut loose.

  Typically, women start as adolescents buying the cheaper brands down at the drugstore. Then they’ll trade up to the fancy, high-priced stuff sold in department stores by the glam representatives of the various manufacturers—the dolls in the officious white lab coats (but Saturday-night-out makeup) brandishing brushes loaded with rouge and base and the rest. This is the high-pressure school of cosmetics selling. You sit on the stool, she turns you into a slightly toned-down version of herself, and you buy what she urged on you (in theory, at least). The prices are intentionally obscure, figuring that you’ll be too intimidated to ask.

  That’s still the standard setup, but it’s quickly changing now thanks to the “open sell” concept finally having come to the cosmetics counter. It’s a form of women’s liberation: The makeup is being freed from the clutches of the demonstrator-saleswoman and is out on its own for shoppers to test, ponder, try and then buy—or not. Some of the old game of let’s pretend is gone, but so are some of the old high-pressure tactics. This open sell also allows women to check the price of makeup without having to endure the humiliation of asking that imperious clerk. By lessening the sticker shock, stores should end up selling more cosmetics.

  These are the immutables of how women shop, the fundamentals that still (and may always) apply. Which is all well and good and necessary if anyone is going to sell anything. But it’s not where the action is today.

  We’ve seen what gender revolt means where male shoppers are concerned: All the contemporary effort lies in taking stores and products intended mainly for women and making them safe for guys. For women, it’s just the opposite—the challenge is in making traditionally “male” products and environments appealing to female shoppers.

  For example, the old-fashioned emporium of nuts and bolts still lingers here and there, but for the most part, one category killer has done away with it. How did Home Depot and Lowe’s manage that? Mainly by reflecting the socioeconomic reality that women no longer depend on men in the old-fashioned way. What does that have to do with wing nuts and duct tape? Well, were the females who spent all day at the barricades of social and political enlightenment going to come home at night and beg hubby (for the fifteenth time) to paint the window trim or install the dimmers? Unlikely. Not to mention the rise over the past three decades of the single female homeowner—women with the money and the desire to feather their own nests. Can we have female cops and firefighters and CEOs and cyber-entrepreneurs and presidential candidates and not have confident, ambitious, fully empowered handywomen, too? I don’t think so.

  And where would these women go to begin their careers as tool guys? To Joe’s Hardware? No—the typical hardware store was exclusively, unapologetically masculine, and maybe even a little unfriendly to female ways. It was a tree house with a cash register. So something had to give. Enter the do-it-yourself chains. (And, from the other end of the retailing spectrum, the hardware boutiques.) They stripped hardware of its arcane side, rendering it unintimidating, even friendly, to the greenest tyro. Doing that required a major shift in mission as well as merchandising: Stores that sold nuts and bolts gave way to stores that sold lifestyles. Under that vast umbrella, nuts and bolts and lumber and sheetrock could be sold alongside lighting fixtures and kitchen cabinets and Jacuzzis and frilly (and nonfrilly) curtains and everything else. These stores sold not hardware but homes. The retail hardware industry has gone from an Erector Set mentality to a “let’s play house” approach, from boys-only to boys and girls playing together.

  This has also been done by hiring salesclerks who are knowledgeable and able to instruct and inspire confidence in female customers. The new wave of home stores hires women for sales and managerial jobs traditionally held only by guys named Joe (or Jim). There are many Home Depot TV spots in which only females appear. The stores also make enthusiastic use of any opportunity for education, whether with how-to videos or free in-store handyman lessons. These stores realize that the woman who is taught to hang a picture today will spackle tomorrow and install crown molding next month. Who do you think is watching Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and HGTV and all the other fix-it shows on TV? The manly men are watching the bass-fishing channel, while the women are watching handymen like Ty Pennington, who resemble nothing more than hunky soap opera stars in toolbelts.

  This infusion of female energy changes even how the stores display their goods. No longer can lighting fixtures simply be hung on a rack or stood on a shelf. Retailers have to show exactly how the lights will look in a room. Instead of displaying a box of bathroom faucets, stores now show the whole tub, complete with shower curtain and towels. Here’s the indisputable proof of how Home Depot and Lowe’s vanquished the old-fashioned nuts-and-bolts emporium: Before, you went to a hardware store only when you needed something. Now, you go just to browse, to see what’s new and what’s on display. You can now actually shop hardware—which means, by defini
tion, that women have won and Joe (or Jim) has lost.

  It’s no accident that the most successful recent paint launches sell under the names of lifestyle gurus Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren. Paint has gone from being hardware to being fashion, all because women got involved. Men don’t paint until the walls are peeling and cracking; women do it when they (the women, not the walls) need a change. Of course, painting has always been within the abilities of your average man or woman. But only now has paint itself—the way it is packaged and marketed and sold—gone unisex.

  There’s another beneficiary of how hardware has changed—all we baby boomer men who somehow made it to adulthood without ever learning how to be handy around the house. As women became more handy, men became less so; we, too, had begun to feel a little intimidated by the old-fashioned hardware store. But even this has come at some cost to men: In the days since feminism’s rise, we’ve seen the decline not only of hardware stores but also of the guys-only barbershop, the shoeshine stand and the men’s clothing and shoe store. First the barriers to female admission to universities, the military, private clubs and all the rest fell. Then unisex hair salons and stores like the Gap, Banana Republic and J.Crew came along to desegregate clothing stores and even styles. The overall thrust of the second half of the century has been to flush men out of their dens, and for better or worse, or maybe both, it’s worked. (Is the pendulum ready to swing back? Have you been to a cigar bar lately?)

  A second great arena for gender upheaval is the computer store and other places where consumer electronics are sold. Stereotypically, we think of males as being the ones at the personal technology frontier, actually knowing what gigabytes mean or shelling out five-figure sums for speakers. More recently, personal computers and cell phones all began life as toys for boys. But the fact is that often, women are the earliest adopters of new technology. When businesses began using computers, the female office workers had to learn first about operating systems and software. Those same women, crunched for time on their lunch breaks, were the earliest enthusiasts of the automated teller machine.

  How did we not notice? Because men and women use technology in very different ways. Men are in love with the technology itself, with the gee-whiz factor, with the horsepower and the bang for the buck. Back before cars had computerized innards, the commonest sight in America was three or four guys assembled around the raised hood of a car, watching its owner adjust a carburetor or install a generator and offering copious advice on how it could be done better. Today, those same men are gathered around the barbecue comparing the size of their hard drives and the speed of their BlackBerries. As they say, it’s a dude thing.

  Women take a completely different approach to the world of high tech. They take technologies and turn them into appliances. They strip even the fanciest gizmo of all that is mysterious and jargony in order to determine its usefulness. Women look at technology and see its purpose, its reason—what it can do. The promise of technology is always that it will make our lives easier and more efficient. Women are the ones who demand that it fulfill its promise.

  From the vantage point of 2009, we know that the female consumer is key to the health of the consumer electronics industry. RadioShack has gone out of its way to hire female store managers. Best Buy has made the correlation between the success of an individual store and the number of female employees it has out on the selling floor.

  What will all this lead to? Well, someday there will be a computer company with a highly visible woman at (or very near) the helm, somebody to hold forth on the business page of the Times and on CNBC—kind of like a female Bill Gates (but with a better haircut). Its products will emphasize not the size of the RAM or the speed of the microprocessor but rather ease of use, versatility and convenience. It will focus on results, not process. Its computers will be sold like refrigerators instead of like scientific instruments. The most heavily promoted feature will be a toll-free number for plainspoken technical help when a program freezes or a printer malfunctions. Then some agency will begin using images of women in its TV and print ads, maybe even in a campaign that lampoons how men relate to technology. Finally, designers will provide ergonomically improved keyboards. Computers will be easy to clean (they’re almost impossible now). Most will even come in colors other than putty or black! And you’ll be able to buy a Coach laptop case in a matching or complementary color.

  Need evidence that men and women see technology differently? At a computer software store we studied, the shoppers were largely male, but the conversion rate, the percentage of shoppers who bought something, was highest among women. That’s because they were in the store with some practical mission to carry out, not just to daydream over a new Zip drive or a scanner.

  The car industry, perhaps the most backward and antishopper business in America, has realized for a few years now that women buy cars. Considering what a male-dominated world car sales has always been, dealers should be hiring lots of women to sell and service cars. But fewer than 10 percent of all car salespeople are female. Hiring women to sell cars isn’t just political correctness, either—most women surveyed say they’d feel more comfortable buying cars from other females. They’re not male-haters so much as they are feeling a little condescended to and maybe even ripped off by male car salesmen.

  Car salesmen live by the conventional wisdom that the male half of a couple makes the decision, not realizing that in many cases the woman is the one who’s pushing for the new wheels or that her objections are what must be overcome. So the pitch is directed at the male while the woman silently burns. After the sale is closed, the buyers will usually be brought back to the service department to meet the manager. Back there it’s usually 100 percent guy-land, starting even with the choice of magazines in the waiting area (Car and Driver and Sports Illustrated but not Vanity Fair or People). Someday soon we may see Ms. Goodwrench or the Pep Girls—Mary, Jo and Jill—but they’re not here yet. Women report a distinct distaste for all their dealings with auto dealers, mechanics and car parts stores. They feel patronized, scorned and ripped off, but they also realize there’s not much of a choice so far. They deserve better.

  Again, the smart first move would be to hire females to fix cars and sell parts. Using actresses in TV spots also goes a long way toward repositioning this all-male world. A few years ago we did a study for a mass merchandiser’s auto parts department. Ninety percent of the shoppers were male, but 25 percent of those who used the computerized information fixtures were female. Clearly, those women had questions and wanted answers that they weren’t getting from the salesclerks. Maybe the clerks didn’t know the answers, or maybe the women just didn’t enjoy asking those guys. Either way, it shows that women are eager to learn how to handle the basic maintenance and easy repairs for their cars.

  If I bought a gas station tomorrow, the first thing I’d do is put up a huge sign saying clean bathrooms. Gas stations persist in displaying most prominently the price per gallon, down to the tenth of a cent, as though we even think that small. Gas is gas, and prices are fairly uniform, too. But clean bathrooms would draw female drivers, who make more use of facilities and so have more bitter complaints about horrible, filthy conditions. The fact is that while gas has become a self-serve item, we need assistance on the road now more than ever. We’re going greater distances and so need directions, decent places to eat and drink, and clean bathrooms. Maybe even someplace with a clean baby-changing table and a working sink and a trash can that isn’t spilling all over the floor. No woman is going to sweat a few pennies in gas price if she is cared for otherwise. Don’t male gas station owners realize that? Mostly they don’t—why would they? But if there were more women involved in the car business, from dealerships to parts and repair to gasoline, the whole industry would look different. It would look like—hardware! Which may mean that even the car business isn’t quite hopeless.

  TEN

  If You Can Read This You’re Too Young

  No doubt you already know this statis
tic: By 2025, nearly one fifth of all American people will be 65 or older. If you live in Japan, Italy, Germany, France or China, the percentage gets bigger. You also realize what that means: old baby boomers. A lot of old baby boomers.

  But what will that mean? Well, right off the bat, it means it’ll be good to be old. How could it be otherwise? When boomers were young, youth was good. When they were middle-aged, a certain seasoned maturity was good. And old people of the twenty-first century won’t be like the current sober crop of senior citizens. Future oldsters didn’t grow up in the Depression or slog through World War II; they came of age during the fat, self-indulgent ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. They weren’t force-fed the virtues of sacrifice, self-denial and delayed gratification, nor did they absorb the quaint notion that to be old is to accept infirmity and inability stoically, as one’s lot in life. The little old lady of 2025 won’t have a spotless Ford Fairlane (that she drives once a week, to church) sitting in her garage. She’ll be buzzing around town in an Alfa Romeo (standard equipment including seats with hydraulic lifts), dressed head to toe in the Nike “Silver” line, parking in the plentiful spaces reserved for people who are old but not impaired (as mandated by the 2012 Spunky Aging Americans Act). Thanks to improved health care, nutrition, fitness and cosmetic surgery, at seventy she’ll look and feel like her mother did at fifty. The kids will be grown and gone, working like ants to keep Social Security afloat, while we geezers squander the fruits of our 401(k)s along with what we inherited from our departed parents, whose demise is even now beginning to trigger the largest transfer of wealth in the history of money.

  For the world of shopping, it’s going to be a party! That’s obvious. All of retailing—stores, restaurants and banks—is going to have to cater to us, because we’ll have the numbers and the dollars. But we’re going to need a whole new world. This one’s not going to work. And we’re not gonna take it!