Invasion of the Zombie Hypno Shoppers

Marketing research has shown that when people go shopping they enter a kind of altered state the resembles a slight hypnotic trance. Retail companies attempt to take advantage of this effect by constructing spacious vestibules or foyers placed between the front door and the rest of the store. The unconscious implication is that you leave the unhappy rational world behind as you go through a archtypal "transport tunnel" and emerge into another bright, happier, and more fulfilling world of shopping.

The fun part comes in when you get a chance to watch people as they pass through the vestibule and enter the store. Many times you can see the change in their state occur almost instantly as you observe the changes of muscle tone in their faces and bodies . Their eyes go from a hurried, alert look to a more dazed, zombi-fied look.

What's really fun is watching them bump into each other and then half mumble their apologies, while they stand there trying to figure out where they want to go next. As I bring up empty carts to stack, I'll offer them to customers as they come in. Some of them are so deep into their state that they never hear me talking to them from a couple of feet away. I have to literally walk right into them almost to get them to see I'm offering them an empty basket.

Yesterday I saw a good case. I had pushed a stack of empty carts up to the front of the store, when I saw a lady coming in with a cart. I stopped where I was and waited, so she could go around me. Instead, she just kept pushing forward, staring right at me almost, and them smashed right in my stack of carts. She quickly snapped out of her reverie and apologized.

"Oh, I'm sorry sir. I didn't see you standing there." There was clear space all around me at least twelve feet in all directions. She was looking straight at me, yet she couldn't see me.

Every time a customer tells me that they always buy too much whenever they come into the store, I always joke with them, telling them it's all a part of our special customer shopping hypnosis program. They always get a good laugh out of that. (Of course, little do they know.....)