Free Why We Buy by Paco Underhill Page A

hours straight. Before long, at least one market’s employees solved the problem neatly—they disconnected Chester, rendering him instantly agreeable but forever mute.

FOUR
You Need Hands
    I t’s a chilly day and the shopper is a woman. What does that tell us?
    It says that at the very least she’s carrying a handbag, and that she’s wearing a coat, which she’ll probably want to remove once she’s inside the store, meaning she’ll have to carry that, too. God gave her two good hands. But she’s shopping with one.
    If she selects something, the free hand carries it. Now she’s down to no hands. Maybe, if it’s small and light, she can tuck the purchase under one arm. Perhaps she’ll sling the handbag over a shoulder or forearm. Then she’ll have…let’s call it a hand and a quarter. If she picks one more thing, though, she’ll run out of hands. Only an extremely motivated buyer will persevere. Human anatomy has just declared this shopping spree over.
    This is a classic moment in the science of shopping. The physical fact (most shoppers have two hands) is fairly well known. But the implications of that fact go unimagined, undetected, unconsidered, unaccommodated, unacknowledged. Ignored.
    The hand-allotment issue came up early in the science of shopping.It was the late ’70s, and I got a chance to pitch what I do to Eastern Newsstand, the largest operator of newsstands in North America. Boy—talk about a tough business. Long hours, early morning deliveries, plus a complicated system of returning all the papers and magazines that don’t sell. My girlfriend at the time knew the wife of the boss, and I got my loafer inside the door as a cocktail-party favor, if memory serves. They treated me okay, but I remember they started off pretty skeptical, and who can blame them?
    I did the work as a freebie. Though I wasn’t paid, the experience taught me plenty, and it also set me up with the Newspaper Association of America, or NAA, with whom I’ve had a rewarding relationship for more than a decade.
    The site they assigned me was a newsstand at that great crossroads of humanity, Grand Central Station in New York City. We pointed our cameras at the stand and watched it during the busiest times, the morning and evening rush hours.
    The success of the business depended on one crucial task—the newsstand’s ability to process large numbers of transactions during the periods when everybody is in a hurry, either rushing from train to job in the morning or from job to train at night. Commuters on the run glance over at the newsstand to see how crowded it is. If it looks as though they can breeze in, buy a paper or magazine or cigarettes or gum and then be on their way, they’ll stop. If it looks swamped with customers waiting to pay and nervously checking their watches, they’ll keep going. They’ll say to themselves, “Too much of a hassle, I’ll miss my train, it’ll be faster to get it elsewhere.”
    The other related fact of newsstand life we noticed was that every customer had one hand already occupied, either with a briefcase or a tote bag or a purse or a lunch. Almost no one goes to work empty-handed nowadays. When you think about it, it’s a rare moment in the modern American’s life when both hands are completely free. Yes, we have backpacks and messenger bags, but those simply allow us to turn ourselves even more into pack animals. Add to the mix a mobile phone, a coffee cup or the occasional ice cream cone, and in most commercial settings, at least half the people you see are moving with only one handfree. I might even venture to say that finding yourself with both hands free is a little disconcerting, as we immediately think we’ve left something behind.
    The second (and kind of seminal) observation we made was painfully simple: Since 90 percent of us are right-handed, we use our left hand for carrying