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How to fashion displays that shoppers can examine comfortably and easily. How to ensure that shoppers can reach, and want to reach, every part of a store. It’s a very long list—enough to fill a book, in my opinion.
    Finally, our studies prove that in general, the longer a shopper remains in a store, the more he or she will buy. And the amount of time a shopper spends in a store depends on how comfortable and enjoyable the experience is. Just as Holly Whyte’s labors improved urban parks and plazas, the science of shopping creates better retail environments—ultimately, I would argue we’re providing a form of consumer advocacy that benefits our clients as well.
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    When I started work on this book in 1997, Envirosell was a pioneer in the world of stores and commercial environments. Ten years later, the term “science of shopping” is part of the vocabulary of any merchant or marketer. And a lot of firms now claim to do what we do. After all, observation is a seminal form of how human beings learn, so why not start an observation business? To every company that has copied what we do, I welcome you to the community of people dedicated to making our lives work better. At the same time, there are other interlopers who have truly muddied the waters.
    The first? Technology companies that have streamlined data collection. They have software packages that can hook up to a facility’s surveillance cameras and count bodies, one after another. How relevant is it to measure the number of people passing a sign or a display? Does that mean they’ve looked, read or shopped? As I sit at my desk on the corner of Twentieth Street and Broadway in New York City, I have a stream oftechnology companies coming in to showcase their latest cutting-edge products. How many times have I heard the expression “This is going to transform retail”? Most of it is what I call technology in search of an application. It can do this and gather this piece of information, and there’s bound to be someone out there willing to pay for it.
    Or I get a call from someone begging me for an hour and I agree to meet them, but before we do there arrives a seventeen-page nondisclosure agreement, or NDA. I have to explain that if someone hires me I’m happy to sign documents left and right, but to call me out of the blue and expect me to review a seventeen-page legal document borders on the obnoxious. Over the years I’ve come up with a good plan. I’ll meet for an hour with anyone who wants to show me something and I’ll give that person my honest response—if he, she or the company gives a $750 donation to the charity of my choice. I’ve raised tens of thousands of dollars for halfway houses for homeless women in New York.
    Some of the stuff I get is outright silly, like a software package designed to track tank movements from spy satellites. Put enough cameras with wide-angle lenses into your ceiling and voilà!—instant science of shopping. Quite a few of these companies are backed by serious venture capital money and propelled by slick presentations, expensive Las Vegas dinners at the appropriate conventions and lots and lots of promises. The venture capital firms see them not as research or consulting firms but as software ventures. Once in place, the output is automated; you sign a two-year contract that promises you weekly reports. The only problem is that two months later, you look up from yet another weekly report and ask, what in the world do we do with this? We have a number of clients who defected from us and bought a fancy software package only to return to us two years later. We were happy to have them back.
    The other objection I have is with what we around the office call Envirosell Lite, where untrained and inexperienced people are sent into the field to do the same work we do: observe what is seen, what is touched, what is read. Simple as it sounds, these terms have to be