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success.
    Except that as we tracked shoppers, we found that the number who would go to the table and then travel through the rest of the store was lower than it should have been. In a case like this, every hour on the hour a tracker would hurry through the entire store and note how many shoppers were in each section, including the register area, the coffee shop and so on. This is the density check that we perform as part of every store study, and it tells us a great deal: It gives an instant snapshot of the store’s population and where people are drawn or not; it suggestswhen something about the architecture or the layout may be inhibiting shoppers from visiting certain areas; and it shows how shoppers move (or fail to) through the premises. And in fact, taken section by section, the number of shoppers who were penetrating the rest of the store was uniformly down. Also, our track sheet maps of customer travels began showing a telltale shallow loop—shoppers would enter, hit the bargain table, then maybe visit one or two more displays, but they never strayed far from the front of the store before heading to the cashier. This was no coincidence, needless to say—customers were choosing from the discount table, then going directly to the register, paying for their bargains and leaving without even browsing the bestsellers or any of the other books selling at the normal profit margins. Our shopper interviews turned up an unfortunate side effect, too: Thanks to the prominence of the bargain table, the store was gaining a reputation as a discounter rather than as the place to go for the hot new book. The success of the table was causing the failure of the rest of the store.
    So much for what can be learned from the register tape.
    The second means of learning what goes on in a store, employed by the most famous names in market research (whether political, commercial or any other) is simply to ask people questions about what they just saw, or did, or considered doing. That can happen in person, online, on the phone or in a focus group—it’s all about asking people what they think.
    Let’s take a telephone poll conducted by the Democrats and the Republicans, for instance, or just the shopper interviews that take place as you exit a store or a shopping center. After a long list of questions, some basic demographic information is taken (age, education, income, sex, race and so on). From those two, a big fat binder full of suppositions is assembled: Forty-year-old Caucasian college-educated married mothers of two living in Northeastern suburbs and driving station wagons would prefer Jif even more if it were low-fat, for example. Or men who buy Coke at convenience stores say they would notice their brand less often if it were any color but red. Or one quarter of all college graduates eats pasta once a week. The possibilities for cross-referencing are endless, and there is undoubtedly some marketing wisdom to be gotten fromsuch studies. But they don’t really reveal much about what happens in a store, when shoppers and goods finally come together under the same roof. There are surveys that do ask customers for information about what they saw and did inside a store, but the answers are often suspect. Sometimes people just don’t remember every little thing they saw or did in a store—they weren’t shopping with the thought that they’d have to recall it all later. In a fragrance study we performed, some shoppers interviewed said they had given serious consideration to buying brands that the store didn’t carry. In a study of tobacco merchandising in a convenience store, shoppers remembered seeing signs for Marlboro even though no such signs were in that store.
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    If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would collapse—boom.
    Fortunately, the economic party that started the second half of the twentieth