Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping by the Author of Why We Buy

Profiling malls as powerful intersections of American consumer marketing, the media, and street culture, an examination of malls as reflections of commercial and social culture considers what does and does not work in a mall setting and what malls mean to everyday people. 75,000 first printing.

Adult/High School–Underhill takes readers on an insightful tour of a typical Saturday at a large, regional mall. He examines the routes there, the shopping center itself, the stores, food, entertainment, ambience, and the customers. He shows why the mall is the way it is and how it could be improved. He provides insight into how the stores are arranged, how they display merchandise, and the different ways that men and women respond to this environment. Written in the first person, the book is light and breezy in style and includes conversations with salespeople, shoppers, and experts in retail sales. According to Underhill, "Teenagers are the ones whose love for the mall is pure and constant and unshadowed by doubt or ambivalence"; by reading this book, they will be able to look more critically at the forces that are at work as they shop.–Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Woodbridge, VA
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Bestselling "retail anthropologist" Underhill (Why We Buy) talks readers through every aspect of malls, from the first glance at their ugly exteriors along the side of the road to the struggle to remember where the car's parked. Although he offers glimpses of shopping centers around the world, the bulk of this excursion takes place in a mall a few miles outside Manhattan, as Underhill and a rotating cast of companions wander through stores looking for various items, commenting about what does (and doesn't) work about the shopping (and social) experience. The colloquial narration works well, even under potentially strained circumstances ("I need to use the bathroom, and you're coming with me"), although the casual recognition of gender differences in shopping patterns sometimes leads to observations that that readers may find off-putting, like comments on the physical assets of "fat and curvy" women. Underhill clearly revels in mall culture, though he looks upon it with a sharply critical eye; among the biggest complaints: lousy maps and the lack of shopping carts. No detail is too small to escape his attention; if one ever wondered why clothing racks always seem stuffed to capacity, for example, he explains it's because rising real estate prices have largely eliminated storerooms. Some might ask how much detail shoppers really want about how stores entice them to buy, but any nagging doubts will be swept away by the engaging manner in which Underhill passes along the keen insights he's gained through years of retail consulting.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* In Why We Buy (1999), Underhill, founder of the consulting firm Envirosell, Inc., took a long, hard look at the American consumer. Now, in this equally eye-opening book, the retail anthropologist examines the other side of the shopper-retailer relationship. He takes us with him to the shopper's most popular habitat, the mall. A typical mall, Underhill tells us, is a cultural environment--but a badly designed one, as though it were put together without any real understanding of the people who would use it. Why, for example, are there so few benches or chairs? Why doesn't your average mall provide shopping carts or a coat check or a will-call desk, so people don't have to lug their purchases around from store to store? Similarly, Underhill (who has spent hundreds of hours observing shoppers in their environment) points out the ways in which retail outlets seem designed without the consumer in mind: cosmetics counters with insufficient mirrors and poor lighting, for example. He tells us what works and what doesn't, and he offers advice on how the stuff that doesn't work can be fixed. Some of this material will be familiar to readers of Why We Buy, but the author isn't repeating himself so much as elaborating on important themes. You might not think a book about shopping malls would be so vastly informative and entertaining, but this one is, and everyone who has ever set foot inside a mall ought to read it. David Pitt
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