Customer Reviews
Good book but not in touch with the present times! - By: T L K, 18 Dec 2008 
It's a good book for the time it was written something like 10 years ago, but the retail environment has dramatically changed since. The book will not give any answers to the today's reader just will bring a smile on their face. I will recommend not to buy this book as most of today's tactitcs have not been even mentioned. The world has changed & changing.... & therefore this book cannot fit into the retail patterns as they are nowdaysin 2008. Internet, digital advertaising, discount supermarkets like Aldi, discount fashion chains like Primark & Matalan, low cost airline & so on have not been mentioned & what the impact on people's buying habits is, which leads to a question, why is this book still being published.
Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management Used for Consumers - By: Donald Mitchell, 19 Sep 2007 
This book's thesis is that by making the process of shopping easier & more desirable, & the choices clearer, the consumer will buy more. That's very similar to the observation that Taylor made about manual labor. Make it simpler & easier, & more work will get done. The methods are remarkably similar. Measuring the actions that the person under study makes, & changing the environment & process to see how the productivity is affected. I think this work is an important extension of behavioral economics, & hope it will be applied to more areas of business.
Although a book like this could be writtenin a very technical way, the voice & perspective are quite approachable. Also, the book is written to be equally interesting to shoppers & retailers. I'm sure you notice a lot of new things about your own behavior & 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 & 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 & behavior are helping & 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 amin a book store, & wondered why the stores persistin doing things that make the store hard to shop in. There's a lot of stalled thinkingin 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 & rarely buyin Laura Ashley orin a computer store? When do you look at yourselfin the mirrorin a store? When do you not even go into a store because you can see long check out lines?
Ultimately, almost everythingin this interesting book is common sense. But chances are that your needs are not often well servedin areas that are important to youin retail outlets. My favorite was the problem of people only having two hands, & 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 & values change. Men's jeans need to bein areas of wide aisles or fathers pushing their childrenin strollers will have to choose between looking at jeans & 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, & how difficult it is to samplein many situations. Do you really want to go through what it takes to take a test drive of 20 different carsin 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 donein 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, & won't let you use the forms to buy.
I encourage anyone who has an interestin being more customer oriented to read this book, & 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, & rapid profitable growth should quickly follow.
really we need to buy so much? - By: Carlos Vazquez Quintana, 17 Jan 2007 
Well, I'm something impressed by this book, as the author displays a series of resources to sell all class of goods that embrace from the common sense to the study of human physiology & his variations according to age & sex.
And truly,in the USA & Europe there's much merchandise for buying, from the indispensable food & hygiene or furniture to the most exotic, luxurious and/or useless things. In other places of world I'm afraid not.
I agree luxury products are a sign of civilization, but not ever & reading this sophisticated book, one questions if havingin count problems as pollution & world heating, we truly need to buy so many products, as Paco Underhill wants to see the society as if Earth resources were as inexhaustible as hunger for shopping, a desire to buy he seems to think will grow endlessly.
A must read for students and those in retail - By: Ms. R. Hazelden, 30 Apr 2006 A really insightful book.
Contains a lot of useful information,in an easy to read & interesting way.
A refresing change from many other retail textbooks!
This book is brilliant - By: , 23 Mar 2006 While I have some reservations about the veracity of Mr. Underhill's argumentsin the E-commerce section, I feel that, overall, this book is excellent. It's given me some great ideas about my own business which I can't wait to implement.
If you own or manage a retail concern, buy this book.
