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In commercial architecture and store design, the “Gruen effect” or “Gruen transfer” refers to the seemingly magical capacity of the design of shopping spaces to lure customers to purchase things that they had not necessarily intended to buy.²²³ According to Siemon Scamell-Katz’s theory of shopping, people enter a store on a “mission.” The design of the space transforms them from mission-driven walkers into flâneurs of sorts, wanderers partly lost in a commercial spectacle, where the smallest and easiest of moves, pulling an item off the shelf and putting it into a trolley, can materialize a commodity relation that may not have been part of their original intention.

Walter Benjamin parsed two of the foundational innovations in Paris of the nineteenth century: the arcade and the department store.^§AS2.3e In the twentieth century, some more radical innovations were to come. Piggly Wiggly was the first self-service store, opened in Memphis in 1916.²²⁴ Its inventor, Clarence Saunders, took out a patent on its apparatus. “The object of my said invention is to provide a store equipment by which the customer will be enabled to serve himself and, in so doing, will be required to review the entire assortment of goods carried in stock, conveniently and attractively displayed … [T]he goods may be selected and taken by the customers themselves while making a circuitous path through the store.”²²⁵ For this new moment in the history of the market, the invention is strikingly clear-sighted about the effects of spatial framing and the micro-dynamics directing the interests of shoppers in the interests of the retailer.

Then, the first supermarket, “King Kullen” store in Queens, New York City, opened in 1930 by Michael J. Cullen, in a large, vacant garage with plenty of nearby parking. It was the beginning of the Great Depression, and the key to rapid success was high sales volume and heavy discounting. “Why pay more?” was the store’s slogan, though with an array of one thousand items within reach, it was designed for customers to spend more.

By 1934, there were 94 supermarkets in the United States, and two years after that, 1200. Then after the Second World War came the shopping center, where the self-service store and the supermarket were combined with the shopping arcade and “anchor” department store: 2,900 by 1959, 13,000 in 1970, then in 16,000 new centers built in the 1980s, a peak decade of mall construction, bringing the total to 45,721 by 2001.²²⁶

The architecture – the multimodal grammar – of self-service stores and supermarkets were different from Benjamin’s arcades, where the flâneur’s relation to commodities was separated by glass and price, so raising the possibility of critical detachment. Now, Saunders’ “circuitous path” took shoppers past products they could pick up, feel as if they might become theirs, and with a simple gesture drop into a trolley, large enough to take more than you need, and with ease.

Concludes Siemon Scamell-Katz: “All of this was followed by a long, slow demise of the practice of selling in shops, which was replaced by the art of presenting product in space.”²²⁷ Here, products speak for themselves, and a new pattern for the meeting of differential interest is established, a new kind of flânerie. The old relationship of human salesperson to consumer – “Can I help you?” followed by suggestive patter, the conversational wiles of an effective salesperson – is replaced by the active, strolling, seeing, feeling, selecting consumer. Speech is displaced by spatial, object-oriented, and embodied meanings. Reification replaces rhetoric.

Scammell-Katz is a leader in a field of business consultants selling the psychology and physiology of shopping to retailers. So is Paco Underhill, a theorist of the “science of shopping,” and owner of the consultancy, Envirosell.²²⁸ Their theories are tested and refined in a research practice of fastidious observation, including analyses of body- and eye-tracking video recordings.

For Scammell-Katz, advertising is an old-school, “linear” model of persuasion: attract attention > stimulate interest > create desire > attain purchase. Instead, he analyzes the spatial and bodily dynamics of shopping, where advertising- or needs-induced missions can be diverted.

“Destination items,” the things like milk that you must buy, are located in the back corner, so you have to pass a myriad of “impulse items” to get there, things you didn’t think you needed until there. They stare you in the face at “buy level,” between waist and chest level, because we look slightly down while walking. Space at the end of aisles (the “endcap” or “gondola end”, grammatically speaking) is purchased by “signpost brands,” even though this creates redundancy for the supermarket order^§MS0d according to which the library of possible purchases is otherwise catalogued, some things now appearing at two places, one expected, the other not. The ordering itself is a mnemonic, a reminder of things that replaces the pre-formulated list, while also supplementing it with things too-easily overlooked or forgotten in purely textual remembering. Then there is the “grab zone” near the checkout where, while waiting in the queue, you are confronted by chocolates and trashy magazines with sensational headlines.²²⁹

These are just a few of the elements of the spatial-object grammar in these tightly controlled spaces. There are also consultancies that can offer finely specified advice on the design and devices for the delivery of ambient sound (such as Muzak²³⁰) and smell (such as Scentair²³¹).

At their fringes, shopping theories start to smack of voodoo, such as Weishar’s “invariable right,” based on evidence he provides that people always look right when first entering a space, followed by a right–left “bounce pattern” where it is possible to predict patterns of lateral looking and so the most effective places to display items for sale.²³²

Charles Fillmore parses what he calls the “commercial event”²³³ in his frame semantics,^§MS2.1.2a by which he means “framing the appeal, in perceiving, thinking, and communicating, to structured ways of interpreting experiences.” These are “cognitive and interactional frames,” “knowledge prototypes,” “schemas,” “scenarios,” or “internal models of the world: … [T]he idea is that people have in memory an inventory of schemata for structuring, classifying, and interpreting experiences, and that they have various ways of accessing these schemata and various procedures for performing operations on them … A frame is a kind of outline figure with not necessarily all of the details filled in.”²³⁴

As between the participants, between seller and purchaser, radically differential interests are expressed in an event whose experience is shared: sell ⬄ buy; charge ⬄ pay. Different aspects of the shared meaning event are foregrounded depending on the participant’s role. The event would not even occur without the differences. These are deeply embedded in transpositional experience. Every re-enactment replicates the experience such that each becomes habitual. But each event is unique, in time and space, and in the configuration of need or desire and anticipated use of specific commodities. The use values vary, and circumstantially their exchange values (their prices), but the frame remains the same.

Interrogating these differential interests, in the shop the retailer appropriates the humane promise of use for the mercenary purposes of exchange. The bottom line for their framing of the event is not the qualities of use, because their self-interest in the market is to ensure that the act of exchange is not left unconsummated. The shopper on the other hand prefigures use in their mindsight,^§MS3.1.2b interpolating the commodity into the ideal of a life redesigned by its presence – a self re-embodied by a fashion item, a life enhanced by a nice or useful thing, a food product that will satiate a craving. This is what pulls the shopper across the line into the social relation that is exchange.

In a commercialized age, such transpositions of meaning draw us as near as possible to moments that would once have been considered spiritual, reminiscent of a time when saintly images or sacred objects could perform miracles, and when the bread and wine of the eucharist could be the body and blood of Christ.^§AS1.1.2a Shopping is the transubstantiation of our time.

Or, in a more modern parsing: “I shop therefore I am.” So says Barbara Kruger,²³⁵ for her late twentieth-century update of Descartes.

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²²³ Victor Gruen, 1979 [2017], Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America, translated by A. Bauldauf, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. x.

²²⁴ Siemon Scammell-Katz, 2012, The Art of Shopping: How We Shop and Why We Buy, London: LID Publishing, p. 28.

²²⁵ Clarence Saunders, 1917, “Self Serving Store,” edited by U.S. Patent Office.

²²⁶ Peter Coleman, 2006, Shopping Environments: Evolution, Planning and Design, Oxford: Architectural Press, pp. 40, 43.

²²⁷ Siemon Scammell-Katz, 2012, The Art of Shopping: How We Shop and Why We Buy, London: LID Publishing, p. 28.

²²⁸ Paco Underhill, 1999, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, New York: Simon and Schuster.

²²⁹ Siemon Scammell-Katz, 2012, The Art of Shopping: How We Shop and Why We Buy, London: LID Publishing, pp. 30, 46, 65, 70.

²³⁰ Joseph Lanza, 1994, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening, and Other Moodsong, New York: St Martin’s Press.

²³¹ www.scentair.com/whos-scenting/retail-scent-marketing-enhances-customer-experience.html

²³² Joseph Weishar, 1992, Design for Effective Selling Space, New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 47.

²³³ Charles J. Fillmore, 1977, “The Case for Case Reopened,” Syntax and Semantics 8:59–82, pp. 72–74.

²³⁴ Charles J. Fillmore, 1976, “Frame Semantics and the Nature of Language,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280(1):20–32, pp. 20, 23, 14, 13, 23, 29.

²³⁵ Alexander Alberro, Martha Gever, Miwon Kwon, and Carol Squiers, eds. 2010, Barbara Kruger, New York: Rizzoli.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 258–262. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Siemon Scamell-Katz’s “Art of Shopping” §AS2.3f