Retail spaces are designed for impulse shopping. When you go to a store looking for socks and come out with a new shirt, it’s only partly your fault. Shops are trying to look so beautiful, so welcoming, the items so enticingly displayed and in such vast quantity, that the consumer will start buying compulsively.
This is the Gruen Effect.
Producer Avery Trufelman spoke with Jeff Hardwick, author of Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, and Ellen Dunham Jones author of Retrofitting Suburbia.