Life on the Hamster Wheel
Book Review: Charles Duhigg, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business", Random House, 2014. Previously I've written about the shopper research of Siemon Scamell-Katz, which paints an unflattering picture of humans in their modern habitat. For example, it seems that people don't look into the window before they enter a store, don't recall the name of the store they are in, don't find the products they are looking for even though those products are in the store, don't read signs, and remember almost none of the brand messages they are exposed to. Some people will say that a store is fantastic and that they've shopped through the whole store, while film footage shows them actually covering half the store and experiencing inconvenience. These post-hoc rationalizations occur because much of the time, people shop on "autopilot" -- and they tend to buy the same brands in the same stores. Scamell-Katz talks about behaviora...