Marketing psychology

Yesterday I took a nice old skirt that I really love to the tailor at the cleaner’s near the restaurant where the Thursday morning business group meets. It needed a new strip of elastic in the waist.

An outlet of My Sister’s Closet, the upscale resale consignment store, is right next door. Well, I really needed some tops to replace the threadbare rags I’ve been wearing with my vast collection of Costco jeans. So, I thought, why not?

“Why not,” of course, is that place is dangerous. But amazingly, I managed not to spend much money and still came away with a major shopping coup.

Ended up at the racks and racks of second-hand Chico’s outfits. Ordinarily I don’t shop at Chico’s and didn’t, even when I had a job, because I dislike their high-pressure sales tactics and because the 1 through 3 sizing is very annoying. However, with no one hovering over my shoulder or lurking outside the dressing rooms to tell me how “wonderful!” I look in something that makes me look like a potato sack tied in the middle, I thought again, why not?

Incredibly, I found a sheer silk shirt with its price tag still on it, really pretty: they were selling it for $20. And even more incredibly, it fit. The original price was $100!

On the same hanger was a matching beige tank top, also with its original $38  price tag hanging from the collar tag: $8.95!

Can you believe????

Also in the $10 and under range, I got a nice loose-woven crocheted sweater from Jones New York and an awesome matching cami-like thing (only heavier fabric than a cami), both in deep amethyst…perfect for wearing with a red hat. 😉

And a cute little blue sweater that will look great with the blue Sanitas clodhoppers I bought a while back. Since clodhoppers are now about all I can wear, thanks to the endless foot and back agonies, I’ll be getting a lot of use out of those shoes and anything that will go with them.

And a pretty crocheted tank top that will look utterly awesome over the collected Costco camis. And a blue polyester tank that they were practically giving away.

I won’t have to buy any more clothes this winter. Except for networking group shindigs and the rare client meeting, most of the time I live in Costco’s old-lady jeans. Once class finally comes to an end, I’ll have few occasions to wear anything else. These tops will make me feel a lot less grody, and they’ll be acceptable for grocery-store runs and schmoozing with friends. The silk top with its beige tank will work nicely for those Chamber meetings.

To give you an idea of what I mean by Chico’s absurd sizing system, one of these things is a size one, two are size zero(!), and the others are size two.  A history of the chain reveals that this scheme is deliberately designed to confuse buyers about sizing: “A woman who in another store would be wearing a size 16 might be flattered to fit into a 3 at Chico’s.” Right: aren’t us customers dumb?

I’ve found that virtually none of the stuff I find in their stores fits, though it’s hard to tell with the sales staff buzzing around your head like hungry mosquitos. The same business profile reports that “Sales clerks were to make astute judgments about fit and style and also offer accessories or additional pieces of an ensemble.” LOL! That’s a polite way to put it.

At the checkout register, I remarked to the clerk that I never go in to Chico’s because I’m so put off by the high-pressure sales tactics. The sales rep laughed and said she’d been in retailing all her adult life (which, we might add, was probably about as long as mine) and that she also wouldn’t shop there, for the same reason.

“You’ll notice how they don’t have mirrors in the dressing rooms. That’s so you’ll have to go outside the room to look at how things fit in those big mirrors—and so the sales staff can get at you every time you try on anything.

“And,” she added, “those are slimming mirrors. They make you look more slender than you are, so you think the clothes look better on you than they do.” She said when she saw herself in one of those things, she thought, “That’s not me in this mirror!” And she never went back.

🙄

Well, I couldn’t say one way or the other whether that’s true. If the mirrors are “slimming,” it must mean I’m not gonna look any better ten pounds lighter than I do right now, and so I guess I can have a beer with breakfast.

But I can say that almost everything I’ve tried on in Chico’s looks awful on me, and I dislike being pestered and barraged with false flattery so much that I don’t shop there. It was interesting that at My Sister’s Closet, where sales assistance is so low-key as to be nonexistent, I found several things in their brand that I like. It may be that the clothes are OK but the atmosphere in Chico’s stores is discouraging.

Am I the only one who finds high-pressure sales tactics SO off-putting as to actually negate any impulse to buy things?

 

The Times takes note today of Safeway’s latest scheme to make customers think they’re getting bargains, thereby inducing them to buy more junk. The stores here in town have been pestering customers for months, trying to get us to sign up for this “program,” which creepily tracks your buying history through the red loyalty card and pitches products to you by offering alleged discounts on things it thinks you’re likely to buy. Cutely called “Just for U,” the program makes you cough up your e-mail address so the corporation can send you digitized coupons, which are loaded onto your red card. Discounts offered to you are based on your shopping habits, which Safeway has tracked and analyzed through your use of the red card.

The website where you go to sign up for this thing is short on information about exactly what it is and how you use it, for the obvious reason that there are some things you’re better off (from Safeway’s point of view) not knowing. Evidently they want you to sign up without thinking too hard about it.

These tracking programs, into which consumers are lured by purported discounts (i.e., those who don’t have a loyalty card pay more than the normal retail price, while those who agree to carry one around and let the corporation track their every purchase pay a fair price), are highly invasive. Corporations don’t want to “offer” you a loving blandishment; they want to sell you stuff, and they’ve learned they can manipulate you by spying on you and analyzing your buying habits. Retailers, for example, would  love to know when you divorce, because you’re more likely to start buying a different brand of beer then, or to purchase whole new sets of trash baskets and kitchen utensils.

This strategy has already had some not altogether benign results. One father, for example, was surprised to learn his high-school-age daughter was pregnant when Target, having divined the fact by what she bought, started mailing her coupons for baby clothes and cribs.

Target is so secretive about its snooping program that when a Times reporter looking into it sent the company’s PR people a prepublication summary of his reporting, he was told every statement was inaccurate, but they would not address any part of the reporting to enlighten him. When he tried to make an appointment to discuss the alleged inaccuracies, they refused to meet with him. When he went in person to Target’s corporate headquarters, he was told he was on a list  of prohibited visitors.

What, really, do they not want you to know about what they know about you? That question alone should tell us something.

Besides the obvious invasion of privacy, there are other reasons to object to favored-customer plans:

1. They’re elitist. You have to own a computer and, for best results you need a smart phone. Not everyone can afford a smart phone, and some people aren’t too clever with computers, either.

2. They add another layer of nuisance to shopping, an already onerous proposition: now you have to go online to check the day’s offers before you head out the door for another trudge through the stores, where you will have to check and bag your own purchases.

3. They’re budget-busters: they lure you to buy products you don’t really need. Today’s Times piece describes a Maryland woman who chose to buy a large bottle of cranberry juice rather than the smaller bottle of cran-apple juice she normally buys and to pick up a package of “discounted” Cocoa Puffs. (Yech! Is there any question why the average American consumes 156 pounds of sugar a year?)

4. Information about your private habits can be used against you just as easily as it can be used to offer you a glowing “bargain” on junk food you shouldn’t waste your money on. This data, folks, can be subpoenaed and, more to the point, it can be sold. The government isn’t allowed to invade your privacy without good reason and a court order, but we allow huge corporations to do so, and those corporations have no limits on who they can sell that information to. Your private habits not only can reveal whether you’re a pregnant 16-year-old, they also can show whether you’ve taken up your old smoking habit again, what and how much you drink, whether you eat a healthy diet or whether you favor Cocoa Puffs and sugary “juice,” whether and how often you buy prescription or OTC medications for ailments like migraines and GERD.

This information can be used against you. Do you really want your soon-to-be ex-spouse’s lawyer to get her hands on records of how much alcohol you buy or whether you buy condoms or birth control pills your spouse doesn’t ever see you use? Do you really want an insurance company to learn, secretly, about your drinking and smoking habits, or about aches and pains that could mean higher premiums or outright denial of coverage?

5. It’s fundamentally unfair to offer one person a lower price because she doesn’t know better than to allow a corporation to track her every move or because she can afford a smart phone and a computer. By its nature, then, Safeway’s favored customer scheme disadvantages the poor, the laid-off, the cautious, and the elderly.

6. They jack up prices all the way across the board. You don’t really believe Safeway is giving away stuff to everybody who consents to being spied on, do you? In fact what’s happening is all the prices in the store go up, and the so-called discounts are mark-downs off inflated prices.

Personally, I would like to see legislation prohibiting retailers from collecting, storing, or analyzing individual consumers’ purchases and shopping habits. In our present political climate, where elected leaders are purchased by well-heeled corporate interests, of course that’s never going to happen.

Welp, in my case I can’t very well take advantage of Safeway’s new spying digital coupon program, because my red card was taken out in the name of my now deceased German shepherd, and the phone number was that of the local Safeway headquarters. I got the number out of a telephone book—it was that long ago!—and I don’t even own a phone book anymore. It’s unlikely that the CIA Safeway publicizes the number of its local corporate offices on the Internet.

So. It’s a good reason to buy local. It’s a good reason to shop at stores that don’t demand you carry a card around or sign up at an online spy shop, even if you have to pay more for the privilege. It’s a good reason to grow your tobacco in the backyard.

Images:

Safeway before Opening. Mattie B from Santa Cruz. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Tobacco in blossom.  kevinbercaw. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license