Published: April 07, 2004 in Knowledge@Wharton In his new book, Call of the Mall, Paco Underhill explains that the reason the rest rooms in America's shopping malls are typically located at the end of a long, gloomy corridor – the suburban equivalent of a city alley – is because malls are built by real estate developers, not merchants.

Real estate developers, says Underhill, so resent having to dedicate any space to a non-revenue producing amenity, that they tuck it out of the way. If you are looking for a rest room at almost any mall in the U.S., Underhill advises, look for an uninviting, dimly-lit hallway. You're there.

Paco Underhill knows this sort of thing because his retail consulting firm, Envirosell, has conducted hundreds of research projects for stores in some 300 malls located in 44 of the 50 states. Underhill's specialty is hiding behind a potted palm (or its equivalent) to observe and take notes on what shoppers do. Envirosell advises clients (among them The Gap, Radio Shack, and Estee Lauder) on such matters as display, counter height, where the checkout counter should be placed and the like.

Underhill has been called a "retail anthropologist" because he studies such cultural customs as the fact that most people entering a store will turn first to the right, rather than the left and that 65% of men who carry a pair of jeans to a dressing room will buy them but only 25% of the women. Underhill wrote about these and other habits of shoppers in a best-selling book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping published in 1999.

Now, he is letting us in on life in the enclosed suburban mall. ("Are we really going to spend an entire book inside a mall?" Underhill asks in the book's introduction. And he replies: "Yes, we are.") Underhill takes readers along on successive visits to an (unnamed) upscale mall on Long Island as a springboard to a wide-ranging portrait of malls in general.

Underhill explains why the stores closest to mall entrances tend to be occupied by hair salons or banks, not shops catering to impulse buyers: "When we enter any building we need a series of steps just to make the adjustment between out there and in here," he writes.
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