Rating: 
Summary: Well Written and Informative
Review: If you are in the business of selling things, this book will give you ideas on what and how to improve to sell more. The subjects are grouped by logical topics and draws upon the author's experience in consulting for retailers. The book is informative and well worth a look.
Rating: 
Summary: Wrong Title - Try HOW WE BUY
Review: I was dissapointed with this book - there is plenty of HOW provided through observation, but really no WHY - after all, Why is about what we do when we get the stuff home (will the kids use Brand X toothpaste as it was discounted or will this pack size remain fresh until we consume it all ?) rather than the process of how we pick it up and drop it in the shopping trolley.The observation stuff was interesting but failed to provide a decision making model of Why we do buy stuff. Read it in the library if you can find a copy.
Rating: 
Summary: Towards a better shopping experience
Review: The author had written this book based on his many findings on buyers' behaviour inside different stores (quite detailed research studies done), and I'm glad he had always substantiated his sayings with one or few case studies, though sometimes leaving them open-ended. Nevertheless, the examples raised up make the whole reading interesting, and provoke my chain of thoughts. As a retailer, it sometimes easy to overlook certain factors, especially when a store is designed in favour towards the owner, instead of the shoppers. For example, it makes sense to give more space to display merchandise (more range, more stock, thus more sales) and less for cashier counters. However, if there're too few cashier points or that they're too cram, that may still be a turn off to customers, who might experience difficulties in searching where to pay and frustrations in long queues. No doubt the author gave many useful pointers on various aspects to remind oneself on ... things like signages, shelves display, and so on, I would think my best gain from reading this book is the way I now look at things. I learn to be more observant towards how customers react in the store where I work, and continuously try to pinpoint areas which require rectifications in its environment to better suit customers, hence creating an enjoyable shopping experience.
Rating:
Summary: Good humorous shopping experiences........
Review: Paco Underhill has written a humorous book with lots of common sense about the whole experience of shopping. He shows us how different men & women are when they shop. He also talks about the neglected shoppers: children and senior citizens. Many retailers should take note of this book and offer it to all their managers. Many of the initiatives he mentioned are so easy to implement and yet people do not have the common sense to see them through. Most of his ideas will increase sales for the retailers that apply them. A very interesting read this Why We Buy.
Rating:
Summary: Valuable, but keep expectations low
Review: I found this book to be interesting, if not mind-blowing, with a lot of basic observations about the shopping experience and the need to make measurement a fundamental part of the way we approach business. The book treads a line between feeding you specific anecdotes and findings from Mr. Underhill's research and giving you a framework for thinking about measuring and tuning your business, but it doesn't commit fully to either path. You may be left feeling like there were not actually that many interesting examples nor was a methodology sufficiently fleshed out to be useful. I view this book as the non-scientific underpinnings of a science (contrary to the sub-title of the book). Mr. Underhill seems like the gentleman scientists of a couple hundred years ago, making excellent and valuable observations, but not having clearly articulated a scientific method that can be applied broadly. This book is certainly worth reading (and for some it may be a real eye-opener), but I feel that a definitive text on the study of buying behavior has yet to be written (or, at least, discovered by me). In favor of this book, it is a fairly easy and quick read, where perhaps a more comprehensive book would not be as accessible. Consider it ...
Rating: 
Summary: Why did I buy this book?
Review: I heard the tie rack-butt brush story on TV and Faith Popcorn, someone I particularly enjoy and respect, called it brilliant in a blurb so... As an small business person who is about to open a retail store I was drawn to a title which might help me make design, marketing, advertising and positioning decisions which would replace gut feelings with scientific evidence. Things like how do shoppers respond to color, to floorcoverings, various types of music? What are the best ways of displaying various types of goods? What is the best way to appeal to a variety of socio-economic groups? Buzz words and wants for different VALS profiles. That kind of stuff. What I got instead was the same huge retailer, grocer, bank, fast food and drug store stories repeated over and over again. There was enough good information here to fill a free pamphlet.
Rating:
Summary: Read this book
Review: If you are a retailer you should read this book or get out of retail... Althought the author sometimes suffers from the "If all you have is a hammer than a hammer is always the solution" syndrome at times and seems not to take into account cost and fesability at times the facts are that he is a genuine expert, he knows his business, his knowledge has tremendous value if considered and implemented and finally, if you cannot take the information in this book and turn it into increased profit so far in excess of the small relative cost of this book than you need to get out of retail.
Rating:
Summary: A 255-page long ad for Mr. Underhill's company
Review: Yes, this book has good things, but they could have been delivered in far fewer pages. Using 255 pages to discuss the same topic over and over again doesn't help. Sometimes I felt insulted by the way the author repeated the same information and advice several times. I wished he could be more to the point and say one thing only once. Another thing that bothered was that the author did not miss any opportunity to advertise his company and to point out that he did this first, that first, etc. Yes, his company may do good things, but the book should not read as an advertisment for his company. Don't get me wrong. The book has useful information, but it is not worth buying it. Try to borrow it instead and skip over some paragraph when you think you read that before. You probably have. Also, be patient with the author's ego. "The science of shopping" is somewhat misleading too. I thought the book would explore how people decide when and what to buy. Instead, the author explains how to sell. Perhaps "The science of selling" would be more appropriate for this book.
Rating:
Summary: Uninformed. Unenlightened. Insulting
Review: Underhill seems to believe that children were put onto this planet to be consumers. Children are first people, not consumers. He makes a cynical and demeaning assumption in denying this fact. Underhill has absolutely no concept of non-commodified public space and seems to think that every flat service is a space where an ad should be. It doesn't seem to matter to him that our spirits and minds might need uncluttered and quiet spaces to inhabit. I resented the author's constant assumptions that consuming is paramount to our economy and that it is an inherently healthy practice. Overconsumption is killing our culture and our planet. Underhill contradicts himself constantly (e.g. First saying that the entrance to a store is no place for shopping baskets and then stating later that the tote bags/baskets placed there by a book store were in just the right place...) This makes much of his book nonsense. Underhill repeats himself ad nauseum ... how many times do I want to hear about products and posters failing until he advises the business person to shift them up, down, left, right...? I got the message the first time he made this point. And, yes, this book is one long informercial. It offers nothing useful to anybody not prepared to buy his service. Finally, shopping is not a science and Underhill is no scientist. He has, by standing around and looking like he knows what he's doing, apparently been able to convince enough people over the years that he's performing legitimate, valuable research. He isn't. And he won't until he can present his methods and findings to credentialled social scientists for review and challenge. Judging by this book, my only knowledge of Underhill, ... and his claim to real-world sociological/retail expertise based on his "research" is nothing more than the ... squawking of a wannabe authority. Why We Buy is shallow, vapid and insulting. But it does illustrate well the inner workings of the unthinking mind.
Rating:
Summary: Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management Used for Consumers
Review: The thesis behind this book is that by making the process of shopping easier and more desirable, and the choices clearer, the consumer will buy more. That's very similar to the observation that Taylor made about manual labor. Make it simpler and easier, and more work will get done. The methods are remarkably similar. Measuring the actions that the person under study makes, and changing the environment and process to see how the productivity is affected. I think this work is an important extension of behavioral economics, and hope it will be applied to more areas of business. Although a book like this could be written in a very technical way, the voice and perspective are quite approachable. Also, the book is written to be equally interesting to shoppers and retailers. I'm sure you notice a lot of new things about your own behavior and that of others the next time you go shopping. I also thought that the book was a good example of the way that stalled thinking holds back progress. For example, without this kind of observational measurement of shoppers, most retailers would never know which shoppers leave without buying and why. Or, why some merchandising experiments succeed or fail. In both cases, there are opportunities to accomplish more, if you can only grasp how your own decisions and behavior are helping and hurting your sales. One of the sections I enjoyed was an evaluation of why many book stores miss sales. I often notice the inconveniences mentioned when I am in a book store, and wondered why the stores persist in doing things that make the store hard to shop in. There's a lot of stalled thinking in the industry, which is why we are fortunate to have Amazon.com to help us. The book does a nice job of discussing how people with different perspectives shop differently. You'll probably get a laugh or two when you find yourself there. Do you secretly dig a sample out of the lipstick or the men's deodorant gel? Do you browse and rarely buy in Laura Ashley or in a computer store? When do you look at yourself in the mirror in a store? When do you not even go into a store because you can see long check out lines? Ultimately, almost everything in this interesting book is common sense. But chances are that your needs are not often well served in areas that are important to you in retail outlets. My favorite was the problem of people only having two hands, and all of the times that we need three or four to negotiate the retailer's set-up. A particular strength of this book was that it also pointed out that behavior is subject to change, as social patterns and values change. Men's jeans need to be in areas of wide aisles or fathers pushing their children in strollers will have to choose between looking at jeans and abandoning their children. That was not a very important problem 50 years ago. I have often noticed how much people like to sample things before buying them, and how difficult it is to sample in many situations. Do you really want to go through what it takes to take a test drive of 20 different cars in 20 different dealers? Probably not. Yet, I would certainly buy a car more often if I had an easier chance to try the new ones out. You are probably the same way. The main weakness of the book is that much less work has been done in looking at consumer behavior on the Internet, so the findings will hardly surprise you. You probably noticed these things years ago, like sites that are hard to navigate, have no site maps, and won't let you use the forms to buy. I encourage anyone who has an interest in being more customer oriented to read this book, and use it to reexamine what your customers have to go through to do business with you. How could you improve? Eliminate your stalls that make buying from you difficult, and rapid profitable growth should quickly follow.
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