Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Maybe you are one of those people who loves to spend time at the mall, but there are an awful lot of us who have mixed feelings about shopping and malls. Paco Underhill, who seems to be a mall-lover, speaks to both enthusiastic and reluctant shoppers alike.

This book was originally subtitled A Walking Tour Through the Crossroads of Our Shopping Culture, which is more descriptive than The Author of Why We Buy on the Geography of Shopping. Underhill takes us on a walk through the mall, visiting malls throughout the world, and taking a look at some of the neglected areas of the mall. He brings along different specialists, such as an architect, a visual merchandiser (which used to be called a window dresser, but is now much more than that), and a teenage shopper. He and his guests deconstruct the mall and the mall experience. The tone of the book is conversational and amusing.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the mall is how relatively unplanned it all is. I suppose I thought that every aspect of the mall would have been studied and designed for maximum profit, but Underhill reveals that this is not the case.
The parking lot is haphazard, the restrooms are almost afterthoughts, the mall map is useless, the lighting is inadequate, the outside appearance and entrance are uninspired.

You know how you never see a clock in a mall? I thought that was deliberate, like in the casinos, where you are encouraged to leave the real world behind and forget about mundane things like whether it is day or night. After reading The Call of the Mall, I can safely assume it is not deliberate, just something the designers never even thought of.

....but perhaps a bit TOO casual. Paco Underhill follows up on his immensely successful "Why We Buy" with an anthropologist's tour of shopping malls and Americans' obsessions with them.

Underhill is worth his weight in gold to retailers; many of the simple ideas he throws away in this volume would be incredibly useful to shoppers and thus worth money to retailers (for example, clothes displayed shoulder-out on racks are annoying because you can't see what they look like from the front: why not angle them so they can be seen?)

He eventually takes on the longer-term topic of whether malls have a long-term future in the U.S., at least in their current configuration.

Underhill has adopted a casual conversational tone, as though he were chatting to you as his personal companion (or transcribing an audiotape of his thoughts), perhaps in order to make the book enjoyable to read. He succeeds at this readability goal, but the book seems somehwat insubstantial because of it: there's even one chapter that's only a page and a half long, on Aquamassage stores.

As much as I liked this book, I wish he cut some of this trivia out. Like a nosh at the food court, you end up wishing that you'd had a full meal.

Much like Paco Underhill's first book, Why We Buy, this book states what seems so obvious, but really isn't until he talks about it. I must say that my only complaint about the book is that it starts out pretty slow. Even though the first couple of chapters are short, if I didn't have the faith that the rest of the book was going to be worth it, or hadn't read Why We Buy, I doubt that I would have had the persistence to endure the slow beginning.

However, that said, once he starts making certain observations and recommendations, the points are one after another and I found myself needing to highlight almost entire passages or would skim over a passage and find myself needing to go back and read because I would miss the significance of certain passages. At this point, Paco Underhill is at his best. He also shops with various other folks to emphasize the socializing aspect of the mall as the "new town square" that only suburbia is able to provide.

Reading it from a retailer perspective, this book was so full of little tidbits and advice, I found the time spent reading it as worthwhile as any book I have read for purely a work related purpose.

I do not want to give too much of the book away but some of the issues covered are parking in the malls, the location of the malls, the maps in malls, the location of certain departments in department stores or individual stores in the mall and how they fail or succeed in various marketing methods.

I would recommend this book to those who need to see their stores (or mall) with "fresh eyes" but also to anyone interested in the phenomenon of shopping itself.

I have not read his first book, but was definitely disappointed with this work. It is an incredibly interesting and valid subject, and yet, Underhill merely superficially skims over the surface of it, with long transcripts of conversation and a barely discernible thesis which tends to meander as a chapter deals with a new subject related to malls.

Essentially, it is hard to know who Underhill is targeting with this work. Is he encouraging consumers to deconstruct mall environments, or illustrating how retailers and developers could improve profit by altering the layout and make up of malls? I get the impression it is the latter, and perhaps this is the reason that the book fails to stimulate, because only a small portion of its readership is likely to be developers/retailers. For this reason, 'The Call of the Mall' reads like an incredibly casual example of the reports he does for companies at good 'ole Envirosell.

Undoubtedly, 'The Call of the Mall' would be better written by an academic. I supposed I wanted cold hard facts, rather than Underhill's subjective observations, irrespective of his footing in retail study. And often, these observations seem somewhat naive and American-centric, particularly in the chapter relating to malls across the world.

Another thing that began to grate on my nerves was Underhill's obvious high esteem for himself and his own talent and wealth. While he balances this with a semblance of humour, it does get annoying. I particularly adored the discussion of a particular Japanese mall, which is near the 'Imperial Hotel' where 'he stays.' Is this meant to be relevant to the narrative or the purpose of the work? I think not. The book is teeming with these kind of discrete but encoded messages.

Overall, a focusless and somewhat boring work, that could have been great with a discernible direction and depth, some actual quantitive facts and less of an emphasis on Underhill's own subjectivities.

One someimes looks on with trepidation when we hear of a sequel. While I initially felt that way about Call of thh Mall, that feeeling was quickly dispelled as I became engaged in Paco Underhill's latest work. It is an enticing and thoughtful survey of not only current retail trends, but a statement about society. Call of the Mall is very much in the spirit of William Whyte, one of the folks who had a large influence on Underhill's approach.

The informal style is deceptive at first, then you become increasingly engrossed by what you're reading. The discussion of the role of the mall, the history and future of the mall as well as numerous examples international examples all made for reading that educated and entertained. A must read for the student of retail and American culture.

Call of the Mall so piqued my interest that I also purchased and read James Farrel's One Nation Under Goods. It is a good complement to Underhill's lastest success!

For anyone who has read the excellent "Why We Buy" by the same author, "Call of the Mall" is likely going to disappoint. It seemingly consists of the editing room floor clippings of the earlier book that relate to mall shopping and were not included in that book due to space or the fact that the material just isn't that interesting. Thus, in my opinion, you have a second rate book that is not deserving of a 215 page treatment.

Indeed, some chapters are so weak that they only consist of a couple of pages. The author wants to say something on the subject of, say, venue alternatives to the mall, but the subject is only worthy of two pages. So why bother? The rapid fire chapters also give the book a disjointed flow.

The author's previous book examined the psychology of shopping, the physical factors and limitations involved in the shopping experience, and strategies stores use (or more to the point should use) to maximize sales in light of these factors. Although this book includes the same examination limited to the mall, it's nowhere near as interesting or, surprisingly, as in depth.

Underhill's first book "Why We Buy" was very good, a smart analysis of the shopping mind and how stores react to it. Call of the Mall, however, sounded more like a bunch of stuff he thought of later--stuff that would've made the first book better, but not enough to write a second. This was more like a step by step breakdown of what designers should notice. Interesting, yes, but a bit long-winded for a casual reader. That makes the style a bit ironic, for it is almost too casual, like he wrote it by walking around speaking into a tape recorder. He's interesting, but this is the kind of book you use to kill time in the doctor's office. If you haven't read the first, "Why We Buy" is the better choice.

Underhill's Why We Buy was required reading for my marketing class, and after opening it up, I was hooked by his research and insight into buying behaviors. By contrast, I struggled through 70 pages of Call of the Mall before coming across some of the more interesting aspects of what retailers could do differently. Overall the book presents few compelling insights; it almost feels that he used up all his juicy bits for the first book and really had to dig at the bottom of the barrel for this one.

Final word: Don't bother...

I teach Consumer Marketing and love social science interpretations of 'real world' behavior. Hence I picked up "Call to the Mall" with personal and professional excitement. Overall, I was disappointed. On the plus side, there are some wonderful examples of behavior that we all do or have seen. However, the is sadly little data to back these up for being more than informed opinions of the author or his companions. He has a company that does this, he must have access to great descriptive stats that would increases both the richness and credibility of his observations. The breezy style makes the book fun and easy to read but I found Mr. Underhill strong personal bias toward urban (especially NYC)shopping repeatedly annoying. I have lived in 8 states in both urban (including Manhattan) and suburban settings and the urban (even NYC) shopping isn't all glorious and the mall shopping all tacky, although you might think so after this book. It reminded me of my students in NYC who had so little breadth of experience that they thought all the world wished it could be like NYC. Finally, the walk-through-the-mall structure of the book emphasizes its lack of themes or theses. Not clear what you take-away about understanding shopping behavior, other than Mr. Underhill's opinion that malls are tacky, out-dated and not well designed (very possibly true but not supported by evidence other than his observations). While I understand that he is not an academic, he is a world-renowned expert on descriptive shopping behavior so I was looking for more richness of analysis and insight beyond the examples.

I work in a retail-related business, so part of my interest in this is professional. For that purpose this was an extremely useful book, an eye-opening examination of how exactly consumers and malls coexist. I'll make actual changes in how I do my job as a result of reading it. But as a former mall rat myself, I also found it to be a terrific, entertaining, sometimes even funny read. Underhill has a smooth and absorbing way of telling his stories, and he's saying things about malls here that no one, to my knowledge, has ever said. Highly recommended, especially for anyone in retail or store design.