Mystery Shoppers

Featured Article April '09

Shops and Post-Modernity

It isn’t often that established liberal newspaper The Economist gets to quote Quebecois former Marxist philosophers. But it was another unlikely combination that provided the opportunity, when The Economist noticed that predominately French post-modernist philosophers were unlikely sages of consumer culture.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, author of The Post-modern Condition, wrote that ‘eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary culture; one listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games’.

Diversity matters and customers don’t wish merely to shop but to have an experience. This is especially the case in shopping centres where, increasingly, consumers go to ‘make a day of it’. Shopping centres have become destinations.

Recent research has suggested that shopping centre visitors want to increase the range of options available to them. They want to visit numerous shops, take in a film, get a bite to eat or even visit an art exhibit.

In particular, a large food court that provides a quality product with good service has been proven to increase the frequency of visits, the time spent in a centre and the average spend. For many people the shopping centre itself, as much as the shops it contains, has become the attraction. This suggests a need to focus on the service provided by the centre as much as the individual stores.

And that is how a former Marxist professor with an impenetrable style gets into a short newsletter on retail and hospitality: he may even have liked the eclecticism of it all.

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