Why We Buy

The first half of this book is incredibly interesting. Lots of common sense advice for store owners. Basically it boils down to always considering the experience of the shopper when organizing the sales floor or designing signage. But all of it very interesting and a little eye opening.

Unfortunately the second half of the book falls apart a little. The authors biggest flaw being that he seems to lack any understanding of how computer's work. He spends an entire chapter discussing how online shopping can't match up with in person shopping. Many of his critiques are reasonable but they fail to take into account that all it takes is a new piece of software or even just a minor edit of currently existing software to fix many of these problems. He also comes out of left field to bash online dating because people who use online dating lack the ‘courage' to meet people in the real world.

If the book had stuck to interesting and fun anecdotes about ‘The Science of Shopping' I think this book could have easily been a 4 or 5 star book. But it loses its way somewhere and never quite comes back to being as good as it could have been.