Complete and Utter Zebu

I have been asked to join the savers’ pressure group, Save Our Savers, as its spokesman. It’s a wonderful opportunity to speak out on behalf of the section of society being made to pay for a recession that was entirely the making of everyone else!

I expect to be blogging regularly on the Save Our Savers website and if there’s any savings-related Zebu, rest assured I’ll be writing about it.

Do come and visit me there and sign up. We need all the support we can get.

Simon Rose

Marks & Spencer’s new chief executive, Mark Bolland, thought he should find out how easy it is to shop in his company’s stores. A group of 10 test shoppers were given an hour to find and pay for 10 items each. Not a single one managed it.

He has ordered big changes without confessing that retailers design the shopping experience to be deliberately confusing. This is because confusion is believed to maximise revenue. Supermarkets, shopping centres and department stores are set out, not for your comfort and convenience, but to baffle and disorientate you. They aim to induce a condition known as the “Gruen transfer”, named after the man who designed the first shopping mall in 1956.

The Gruen transfer deliberately brings about “scripted disorientation”. Shoppers are so bamboozled that they forget what they wanted to buy and realise there are SO MANY THINGS they could be spending their money on.

It’s why, when you’re out shopping, you can rarely see the outside world. There are plenty of mirrors, but no sight of a bright, blue sky to remind you there are other things to do than shop. Here are a few more tricks they employ:

• Placing successive escalators in such a way that you have to walk around the floor to find the next route up. On the way, of course, you pass a variety of tempting purchases.

• In department stores, over the past few years, straight lines have been outlawed. Why let your customers go immediately to the department they want when you can lead them around umpteen tempting displays? This uses more shoe leather, too, which is good news for the footwear department.

• Placing essential items such as milk, bread and eggs as far as possible from the entrance. Supermarkets are fully aware that these are ‘need to buy’ items, making you pass aisles of groaning shelves to get to them, increasing the chances of you making further impulse purchases along the way. Other low margin staples will be tucked away in some hard to locate place, so you have to trawl the store to find them.

• Placing fruit and veg near the entrance, because these are thought to give customers a feeling of happiness and health, and rev them up to spend more.

• Placing regular-priced items in bins at aisle ends, so they resemble ‘bargain bins’ – even though they aren’t.

• Positioning high profit margin items at eye level. If you’re trying to save money, make sure you bend down to look at the lower shelves.

• Wafting the smell of freshly baked bread at all times of day to make you feel hungry, even though the actual baking probably finished hours before.

• Changing layouts to move regularly purchased items around. If something isn’t where you expect to find it, you have to pass a lot more products before you track it down.

• Deliberately confusing unit prices to prevent shoppers from making accurate comparisons. Similar items are often priced by weight for one commodity, and by volume for another

• Pricing luxury items ‘per 100g’ rather than ‘per kg’ so you don’t realise how much they really cost.

As far as we’re aware, no British supermarket has yet resorted to a trick employed by one American chain, which painted a child’s hopscotch game on the floor right beside all those ‘can we have?’ cereals. The lesson seems to be: make sure you eat before you shop, so that you’re not hungry; take a detailed list; and have a calculator handy. And a GCSE in maths wouldn’t go amiss.

How casinos carpetbag their customers

One of our real bugbears is being informed smugly by London Underground that there is a “good service” on the Tube. Those of us who are forced to use this hellish system have many descriptions for the experience, but the phrase “good service” is not normally one heard from people’s lips.

What London Underground actually means by “good service”, according to their own terminology is “no noticeable impact on your journey”. So it’s still a “good service” if it’s as overcrowded, stifling, smelly, brutish and unreliable as it is on every other day.

We all hate spam, except presumably the loathsome bottom-feeders who flood our in-boxes with the bloody stuff. However, we noticed a while back that while the products they tout may be pretty well identical, month on month, year on year, there’s often an element of inspiration when it comes to inventing the names of the people who purport to be emailing us. Here are some of the names we couldn’t help admiring.

Authors short of inspiration may find the list useful. Or not. If you know of any other good ones, do let us know.

• Spurious Ponder
• Paris King
• Elfleda Yates
• Piety Cutler
• Agamemnon Greene
• Cerberus Pruett
• Goliath Newton
• Miroslawa Lovelace
• Pericles Childs
• Sylvain Motley
• Ammiel Teague
• Houston Blevins
• Jaffer Clay
• Leighton Vasquez
• Cornelius Waddell
• Chauncey Hargrove
• Clotilda Stark
• Karen Kpka
• Mortimer Good
• Booth Julio
• Bartholomew Blackwell
• Laia Krob
• Billie Trejoy
• Latonya Dodge
• Addie Lacey
• Ootis Julius
• Raymundo Hope

Clearly it isn’t only in the West that contempt is shown towards consumers and viewers. Keep your eye on the scissors in this Russian shopping channel demo and note how the sharpened scissors are swapped for a completely different pair. Of course, it could be argued that if you’re daft enough not to notice, you deserve what you get.

Swedish photographer Chris Maluszynski was surprised by the garishness of the carpets in the casinos of Las Vegas. Until, that is, he realised that they had a purpose – to stop the punters feeling sleepy because sleepy tourists don’t spend money. If your eyes stray to the floor and see one of these monstrosities, you are likely to be jolted awake again.

A collection of his photographs of these extraordinary carpets, quite unlike anything you will find anywhere else, is on The Daily Telegraph website. If you’re feeling sleepy at your keyboard, perhaps flipping through them will work the same trick. This ploy is spoofed in the current family film Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Updating the Greek myths, Percy and his colleagues are detained in a casino by being persuaded to eat lotus flowers. They eventually emerge to discover that days, not hours, have passed.

Retailers use a variety of psychological tricks on their customers too, of course. You’ll find few windows in department stores or shopping centres, though there are usually plenty of mirrors, which serve to slow shoppers down. In fact shopping centres are specifically designed, not for your comfort and convenience, but to confuse and baffle you. They aim to induce a condition known as the “Gruen transfer”, named after the man who designed the first shopping mall in 1856.

The Gruen transfer is the moment when customers suffer “scripted disorientation”. They slow from a confident stride to a baffled dawdle, eyes glazing over as they forget what they came for and realise there are SO MANY THINGS they could be spending their money on. So don’t feel daft next time you lose your bearings in a shopping mall. The bally places are designed to keep you there as long as possible. At least they don’t have Vegas-style garish carpets. Yet.

How splendid, given the way most ebay sellers over-egg whatever particular pudding they’re trying to con you into buying, to come across a listing that tells it like it is.

605impala certainly does that in trying to shift a copy of one of his mother’s old books, Linda Goodman’s Star Signs:

“This is a wonderful book. If you enjoy talking to Flying Spaghetti Monsters before you drift off to sleep, then this book is for you. There is no dust sleeve included with this 549 page book made exclusively from the Scrotal fur of a Unicorn. This book belonged to my mother in the 1970′s.

“There is a pencil scribble on the last blank page. I’m pretty sure I did that. At 4 years old, I think I was trying to spell “bullsh1t.” Cut me some slack, it ended up kinda sh1tty looking, but I knew that what I was writing was true to my 4 yr. old heart.

“Anyhoo, this completely bogus piece of crap astrological book from 1968 is up for auction.
If this hunk of sh1t sells, I will donate 1/2 of the proceeds to the charity of your choice!”

At the time of writing, there were no bids. Perhaps, on ebay, honesty DOESN’T pay.

See the listing. (If the listing has expired and I forget to replace it with a web archive I’ve saved, please let me know)

Our immense thanks to Zebu collector Chris who not only spotted but bought a pair of these “ozone friendly” socks in Deptford market.

We’d say the blurb was priceless, but we imagine Chris managed to barter them down to a little less than that.

Not all instances of deception in modern society make us despair of our fellow man. Sometimes pulling a fast one can be positively applauded, which is why, in Complete and Utter Zebu, we devoted a section to the naming of racehorses. For it is a long-established tradition among owners to try to come up with embarrassing names that will leave the commentators with egg all over their faces.

The Jockey Club and now Weatherbys, who vet the names, have to be alert. But they are not infallible. There are plenty of examples of horses with double-entendre names which have run races over the years. Among those in the book are such proud steeds as Noble Locks and Katchit. To the best of our knowledge, there have been at least three horses with the delightful name Hoof Hearted, one of them apparently still a feature of South African racetracks.

If you need a pick-me-up, do watch this video of an American horse of that name racing in 1989, with the commentator getting ever more excited as the animal in question nears the finishing line, concluding with the immortal words: “Hoof Hearted in the winner’s circle.” And yes, this is genuine.

Other posts:
You won’t believe how they got the figure for the numbers of CCTV cameras in Britain
Christmas carols – from a Health and Safety perspective
The wine label that breaks the law – by telling the truth