Observations - July 21

ABUNDANCE - it matters

While shopping at  the Briarcliff Whole Foods Tuesday night, July 19, I decided to take a seat near the bakery and observe other shoppers and their beahviors to see what I could learn. Here are my thoughts.

One of the first observations I made was that six of the eight people who purchased invidivual cookies from the bakery case ignored the signs that ask customers to use the wax paper to grasp the cookies they chose for purchase.   All eight shoppers did use the small bags provided by the store and placed their chosen cookies in these bags, but most ignored paper they were asked to use which was stored in the display next to the bags they all used. I think the shoppers ignored the request to use the paper because they already intended to touch the cookies they planned to purchase. Of course, in reality people change their minds and end up touching cookies they don't purchase. Perhaps if the goal is to make sure each shopper only touches the cookies they purchase, the store might consider placing each cookie into a small pouch just large enough to keep hands from touching other products. They already provide the paper to grab the cookies, maybe it would make sense to go ahead and slip each cookie into some sort of half pouch and accomplish the desired result - you only touch the cookie(s) you plan to buy.

My next observation involved some of the same cookie shoppers.  I watched three shoppers reach for sugar cookies and decide not to buy any because there was only one left. All three made alternate choices from varieties that had 8, 10, or more cookies to select from.  They wanted to choose their cookies, not take the last picked over cookie, even if it was the variety they wanted most.

Finally, the same evening, while standing in front of the store, I noticed three women stop and specifically remark on the how beautiful the plant display was in front of the store, but none of them purchased any plants.  Each female shopper was accompanied by someone and each stopped to share a plant anecdote with their companion as they admired the display. Everyone likes plants and can appreciate beautiful things, even if they have brown or worse colored thumb.

Also worth noting..........on the same trip, I observed one person select three cookies, place them in the bag, and then eat all three before going to the checkout counter.  They aren't packaged or bar-coded so there is an honor system aspect to fresh baked goods.  And because Whole Foods offers samples, it's not unusual to see someone walking around the store munching on something.  In this one case, the muncher was actually shoplifting.

I visited the Ponce De Leon Whole Foods store on Wednesday, July 20th for the first time in about 4 years.  I used to frequent this store when I last lived in Atlanta.  A definite trend I noticed was the expansion of the prepared foods areas.  Where there used to be a salad bar, there was now a hot bar, cold bar, bbq bar, and gelatto station. Whole Foods seems to be morphing into an eat-in or eat-out grocery store.  Maybe grocery store is no longer the most accurate way to describe Whole Foods.

Moving away from food for one example, I also noticed a trend happening on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming over the past eight months or so.  Adult Swim is Cartoon Networks more mature programming that runs later in the evening and overnight.  Most networks run programs that fit into 30 or 60 minute blocks.  During Adult Swim, individual programs are often 30 minutes long, but more and more, they are 10 or 15 minutes in length.