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century has fostered more shopping than anyone would have predicted, more shopping than has ever taken place anywhere at any time. You almost have to make an effort to avoid shopping today. Stay out of stores and museums and theme restaurants and you still are face-to-face with Internet shopping twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, along with its low-rent cousin, home shopping on TV. You have to steer clear of your own mailbox, too, if you’re going to duck all those catalogs.
    As a result, every expert agrees, we are now dangerously over-retailed—too much is for sale, through too many outlets. The economy even at its strongest can’t keep up with retailing’s growth. Judging from birthrates, we’re generating stores a lot faster than we’re producing new shoppers.
    In 2008, across most of the first world, we are building stores and malls no longer to serve new customers but to steal someone else’s. There is no irony that the cutting edge of retail today is no longer found in North America or Western Europe. Moscow, Dubai, Shanghai and Mumbai are the newest retail hot spots—places where money isyoung, economies are booming and you have a whole lot of pent-up demand.
    Still, here in the United States, our focus has been on same-store sales—how can you do more business in the same space or location? That focus on tactics has been another accelerant that has fueled the growth of the science of shopping.
    There’s another reason that the science of shopping is a force today.
    Generations ago, the commercial messages intended for consumers’ ears came in highly concentrated, reliable forms. There were three TV networks, AM radio only, a handful of big-circulation national magazines, and each town’s daily papers, which all adults read. Big brand-name goods were advertised in those media, and the message got through loud, clear and dependably. Today we have hundreds of TV channels, and remote controls and TiVo to allow us to skip all the ads if we choose to. There’s FM and satellite radio now, a plethora of magazines catering to each little special interest, a World Wide Web of infinitely expanding sites we can visit for information and entertainment, and a shrinking base of daily newspaper readers, all of which means that it is harder than ever to reach consumers and convince them of anything at all.
    Simultaneously, we are witnessing the decline of the influence of brand names. A generation or two ago, you chose your brands early in life and stuck by them loyally until your last shopping trip. If you were a Buick man, you bought Buicks. If you were a Marlboro woman, you smoked Marlboros. You chose your team—Coke or Pepsi, Kenmore or Whirlpool, Zest or Ivory—and stayed with it. Today, in some ways, every decision is a new one, and nothing can be taken for granted.
    What all that means is that fewer buying decisions are being influenced outside the premises of the store. And many more of those decisions are being made in the store itself. It means that shoppers are susceptible to impressions and information they acquire inside stores, rather than relying on brand-name loyalty or advertising or marketing to influence what they buy. The level of impulse purchasing is going through the roof—in supermarkets and everywhere else, too. Even big decisions are being made right there on the selling floor.
    As a result, the most important medium for transmitting messages and closing sales is now the store and the aisle. That building, that place, has become a great big three-dimensional advertisement for itself. Signage, shelf position, display space and special fixtures all make it either more or less likely that a shopper will buy a particular item (or any item at all). The science of shopping is meant to tell us how to make use of all those tools: how to design signs that shoppers will actually read and how to make sure each message is in the appropriate place.