I worked in retail for 6 years, and these are the subtle ways clothing stores get you to spend more money
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
- Clothing stores use subtle strategies to get you to spend more money without thinking twice, even if you walk in with a set budget.
- Sales associates are trained to up-sell and cross-sell, suggesting both more expensive items and additional items based on customers' needs and desires.
- Companies meticulously arrange their stores to optimize visual details, cater to shopping patterns, and keep the customer in the store for as long as possible.
- I worked in retail for six years, and these are some of the specific strategies my managers instructed me and my coworkers to use.
Many of us overbuy more often than we'd like to admit.
You walk into a store with a clear mission to purchase a new pair of shoes or a shirt for work, but the moment you see red sale signs and pristine stacks of clothing, your goal gets a bit hazy. Not to mention, a friendly salesperson helped grab your sizes and explained the fit. You leave the store two bags heavier and a receipt with five times what you planned on spending.
Eye-catching signs and "tailored" styling advice can certainly prey on your self-control, but retailers' tactics aren't always obvious. They often use the smallest detail to entice you to spend more, from the way they arrange the floor to the strategies they tell their sales associates to use.
I worked in retail for six years as a sales associate for companies like Ralph Lauren and Fossil, and my managers always gave me and my coworkers specific strategies to get customers to pick up more items and spend more at the registers.
Here are some of the subtle ways stores get you to spend more without thinking twice:
They place their top sellers at the front of the store.
Hollis Johnson
Most stores arrange their floor plans so that the first things you see are the newest, most expensive, or most popular items, and the markdowns are all the way in the back. This is so that the pricier items will catch your attention first, and hopefully you'll be more apt to have a handful of full-price pieces by the time you reach their sale section.
Brands that specialize in denim, like American Eagle and Gap for example, will always keep their jeans toward the front of the store. When I worked at Fossil in Times Square for the holiday season, they kept their new smartwatches at the front of the store so that people walking by the windows would see them immediately and want to try them on.
They keep less stock on the floor.
Jennifer Ortakales
While H&M and Zara keep their racks jam-packed, many retailers believe less is more. If they have fewer items on the floor, you'll likely assume they have less stock in the back — and hurry to buy your size before it sells out.
Sale signs can be deceiving — but they're not wrong either.
Jennifer Ortakales
Look carefully at signs advertising huge markdowns in large font. They will most likely have phrases like "starting at," "from," "up to," or "select styles" in fine print. That could mean the promotion only includes a couple items on that entire rack, but it likely gets you to look through it all anyway.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, an advertisement is considered deceptive if "it causes or is likely to cause substantial consumer injury which a consumer could not reasonably avoid, and it is not outweighed by the benefit to consumers."
A sale sign is unlikely to cause much harm to a customer, but it can still be frustrating. I've dealt with many angry customers who were convinced a large percentage followed by an asterisk and fine print was illegal.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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