North Korea isn’t a country where Americans are all that keen to shop, what with commerce with the country being officially banned. They also don’t make a lot of things that we want to buy. There are some, though, and prospective importers have to send a letter to the Treasury Department making their case. [More]
shopping
Motorized Shopping Carts Are Not For Drunken Shoplifting
By 6.17.13
If you’re going to make a daring escape from a grocery store after a dessert shoplifting spree, it’s probably wise to use something other than one of the store’s own motorized shopping carts. It didn’t end well for an Alaska man who tried to do just that at a Fred Meyer store last week. [More]
Man Accused Of Filming Tween Girls In Gap Changing Room With His iPhone
By 5.31.13
According to police, a 24-year-old Minnesota man went on a voyeuristic rampage at a local mall in April, slipping his iPhone under the door of a Gap changing room, up a shopper’s skirt, and into a ladies’ room stall. Surveillance camera footage and information from a Gap worker who happened to have attended high school with the suspect led to his arrest. [More]
Hey Best Buy, If You Want Us To Shop There, Try Selling People Stuff
By 5.7.13
Michael is buying his mother a new computer for Mother’s Day, because he’s a good son and she’s moving away soon. As long as he was buying a computer, he wanted to get some reward points from Best Buy on his credit card. Only he couldn’t. While the product page bragged of “free shipping,” Best Buy was not willing to ship the item. At all. [More]
Hobby Lobby May Have Overreacted To Theft Of $5 Worth Of Iron-On Letters
By 5.3.13
A Texas woman might be a little absentminded or beginning to suffer from dementia, but says that she didn’t mean to walk out of a craft store with a handful of embroidered iron-on letters. Unfortunately, she was shopping at Hobby Lobby, a chain whose management takes loss prevention almost as seriously as their Christian faith. The store wants the customer and her daughter to pay more than $1,000 in fines and civil penalties for the theft. [More]
Here’s How Stores Get You To Buy Stuff Using A Sensory Bombardment
By 4.19.13
You walk into a store, determined to just buy the one thing you need, the thing you came there for. Your resolve is unwavering, your spirits high — and then you’re bombarded by a slew of sensory shopping cues designed to get you to shop your little heart out. Any retailer worth its weight in marketing gold knows a few tricks of the trade, and will use them to get you to spend more if they can. [More]
Kate Spade Store Demands Proof I Didn’t Steal My Wallet Before Repairing It
By 4.11.13 — Updated: 1.31.17
The zipper on Ali’s Kate Spade wallet would no longer zip. She likes the wallet, so she checked whether the company would repair it for her. They would! Yay! She made plans to bring it to the Kate Spade store at her local mall and send it off for repair from there. Only the store manager wouldn’t accept the wallet without some kind of proof that she had bought it…with an implied “proof that she hadn’t stolen it.” Here’s the funny thing: she writes that when her friend walked in the store and handed over the wallet for repair, she was not asked for a receipt or any proof. Oh, incidentally: Ali is black. Her friend is white. [More]
Hey, Look, Basic Math Can Be Really Useful!
By 4.10.13 — Updated: 4.11.13
The retail environment takes a huge toll on people who can’t do math. Sort of. This Safeway display is fairly typical: identically-sized packages of the anti-histimine loratadine (generic Claritin) sit side by side, with one price a little higher than the other. Look more closely: those boxes are the same size because the pills are impossibly tiny. One bottle offers more than twice as many as the other. [More]
4 Ways Retail Stores Are Monitoring Your Every Move
By 3.27.13
From the second you pull into a store’s parking lot, you can be relatively certain there are electronic eyes on you. But we’re way past the days of black-and-white monitors to discourage vandalism and shoplifting. Today’s retailers follow you everywhere and know lots about you. [More]
Just Because Sports Authority Says It’s Having A “Sale,” That Doesn’t Make It True
By 3.25.13
Stephanie saw that there was a sale on Asics sneakers at Sports Authority, and she just happened to be interested in buying some. When she reached the store, she noticed that many of the shoes had “Sale” tags on them, but if you moved those tags aside, this didn’t actually represent a “sale.” [More]
Strictly Speaking, This Party City Sale Sticker Is True, But It’s Still Stupid
By 3.19.13
Shopping at Party City, Jeff noticed this odd sticker. It advertises discounts of “up to 75% off” and that the item retails at $9.99 and now costs $10. Only that’s not really the confusing part. [More]
4 Things That Make You Spend Too Much Money At The Grocery Store
By 2.28.13
Roaming the aisle of the grocery store can sometimes feel like walking around in a big money pit. Sure, everyone needs food to survive, but does it have to end up costing an arm and a leg every time you make a trip to stock up on your weekly necessities? If you’re walking out shaking your head and wondering how it all piles up, you can probably chalk it up to a few reasons. [More]
Ulta Has Secret Limits On Clearance Items, Won’t Sell Me 27 Hair Straighteners
By 1.31.13
Courtney was on a mission. It’s her job to find things for people at low prices, and then buy them in large quantities. For example, one day she learned that beauty chain Ulta had Big Chi Digital Hair Irons, which usually cost $169.99, on clearance for $49.99. Score! One of her clients wanted these, and there were twenty-seven of them in stock. Now, “Clearance” should mean that the store is trying to clear out stock, and should be happy if someone comes along and scoops up everything on the shelf. Right? Not at Ulta. They’d rather not sell items at all than sell them to Courtney by the cartful. [More]
Michaels Clearance Price Doesn’t Apply To Clearance Items…Wait, What?
By 1.30.13
What happens when you divide by zero on a cash register? You can’t. Kim found something about as confusing while shopping at Michaels recently: a clearance sale that doesn’t apply to clearance items, including the item that she wanted to buy. [More]
NJ Township Offers Property Tax Credits For Shopping Locally
By 1.24.13
Last fall, Marlboro Township, NJ, announced what it believes is the first program in the country that encourages residents to shop at local businesses by offering deductions on annual property tax bills. [More]
How Online Price-Matching Would Work In The Best Of All Possible Worlds
By 1.18.13 — Updated: 9.18.14
When readers write to us to complain about their experiences with in-store pickup, they’re measuring what actually happened against a sort of retail Platonic ideal. “This item has a different price on your website, retailer!” they expect to say at the register. “You are correct, good sir; let me give you that better price,” the cashier should say, pressing a magical “savvy Internet reader” button on the cash register that unlocks those prices. Alas, this doesn’t happen. Or does it? [More]
How To Get Good Service At A Chronically Understaffed Walmart
By 1.2.13
What should you know when you place an online order that you plan to pick up at your local Walmart store? An insider––an ordinary store employee in an ordinary Walmart––reached out to us to explain to customers what you should know before you click “Site-to-Store,” and other pitfalls. Walmart may employ millions of Americans, but it still tries to run stores with the smallest crew that it get by with.
Let’s hand the floor over to the employee, who we’ll call “Samantha”: [More]
As Offline Retail Dies, Commercial Real Estate Apocalypse Looms
By 12.31.12 — Updated: 8.12.14
As we do more and more of our shopping while sitting on our couches in our pajamas with an Ultrabook, we’re destroying a glorious American institution: the mall. Realspace retailers large and small alike have gone bankrupt and shut down or scaled back: a process that the recession only sped up. The best case scenario? Those former malls might become community colleges or gain some condos. What’s more likely? Rotting husks of shopping centers dotting our cityscapes, dragging down property values and making everyone sad. [More]
