Why We Buy (15 page)

Car salesmen live by the conventional wisdom that the male half of a couple makes the decision, not realizing that in many cases the woman
is the one who's pushing for the new wheels or that her objections are what must be overcome. So the pitch is directed at the male while the woman silently burns. After the sale is closed, the buyers will usually be brought back to the service department to meet the manager. Back there it's usually 100 percent guy-land, starting even with the choice of magazines in the waiting area (
Car and Driver
and
Sports Illustrated
but not
Vanity Fair
or
People
). Someday soon we may see Ms. Goodwrench or the Pep Girls—Mary, Jo and Jill—but they're not here yet. Women report a distinct distaste for all their dealings with auto dealers, mechanics and car parts stores. They feel patronized, scorned and ripped off, but they also realize there's not much of a choice so far. They deserve better.

Again, the smart first move would be to hire females to fix cars and sell parts. Using actresses in TV spots also goes a long way toward repositioning this all-male world. A few years ago we did a study for a mass merchandiser's auto parts department. Ninety percent of the shoppers were male, but 25 percent of those who used the computerized information fixtures were female. Clearly, those women had questions and wanted answers that they weren't getting from the salesclerks. Maybe the clerks didn't know the answers, or maybe the women just didn't enjoy asking those guys. Either way, it shows that women are eager to learn how to handle the basic maintenance and easy repairs for their cars.

If I bought a gas station tomorrow, the first thing I'd do is put up a huge sign saying clean bathrooms. Gas stations persist in displaying most prominently the price per gallon, down to the tenth of a cent, as though we even think that small. Gas is gas, and prices are fairly uniform, too. But clean bathrooms would draw female drivers, who make more use of facilities and so have more bitter complaints about horrible, filthy conditions. The fact is that while gas has become a self-serve item, we need assistance on the road now more than ever. We're going greater distances and so need directions, decent places to eat and drink, and clean bathrooms. Maybe even someplace with a clean baby-changing table and a working sink and a trash can that isn't spilling all over the floor. No woman is going to sweat a few pennies in gas
price if she is cared for otherwise. Don't male gas station owners realize that? Mostly they don't—why would they? But if there were more women involved in the car business, from dealerships to parts and repair to gasoline, the whole industry would look different. It would look like—hardware! Which may mean that even the car business isn't quite hopeless.

N
o doubt you already know this statistic: By 2025, nearly one fifth of all American people will be 65 or older. If you live in Japan, Italy, Germany, France or China, the percentage gets bigger. You also realize what that means: old baby boomers. A lot of old baby boomers.

But what will
that
mean? Well, right off the bat, it means it'll be good to be old. How could it be otherwise? When boomers were young, youth was good. When they were middle-aged, a certain seasoned maturity was good. And old people of the twenty-first century won't be like the current sober crop of senior citizens. Future oldsters didn't grow up in the Depression or slog through World War II; they came of age during the fat, self-indulgent '50s, '60s and '70s. They weren't force-fed the virtues of sacrifice, self-denial and delayed gratification, nor did they absorb the quaint notion that to be old is to accept infirmity and inability stoically, as one's lot in life. The little old lady of 2025 won't have a spotless Ford Fairlane (that she drives once a week, to church) sitting in her garage. She'll be buzzing around town in an Alfa Romeo (standard equipment including seats with hydraulic lifts), dressed head to
toe in the Nike “Silver” line, parking in the plentiful spaces reserved for people who are old but not impaired (as mandated by the 2012 Spunky Aging Americans Act). Thanks to improved health care, nutrition, fitness and cosmetic surgery, at seventy she'll look and feel like her mother did at fifty. The kids will be grown and gone, working like ants to keep Social Security afloat, while we geezers squander the fruits of our 401(k)s along with what we inherited from our departed parents, whose demise is even now beginning to trigger the largest transfer of wealth in the history of money.

For the world of shopping, it's going to be a party! That's obvious. All of retailing—stores, restaurants and banks—is going to have to cater to us, because we'll have the numbers and the dollars. But we're going to need a whole new world. This one's not going to work. And we're not gonna take it!

What's wrong with this world? For starters, all the words are too damn small. See this sentence? How could you? Too damn small. How about the morning paper? Forget it. Too damn small. The directions on your jar of organic herbal laxative? Too. Damn. Small. And you're not even going to try squinting. (It causes wrinkles.) If you can't read it, by gum, you just won't buy it. And if
you
don't buy organic herbal laxative, nobody will. And if nobody buys it…well, you see where this is going.

Human eyes begin to falter at about age forty, and even healthy ones are usually impaired by their sixties. With age, three main ocular events take place: The lens becomes more rigid and the muscles holding it weaken, meaning you can't focus on small type; the cornea yellows, which changes how you perceive color; and less light reaches your retina, meaning the world looks a little dimmer than it once did. The issue of visual acuity, already a major one in the marketplace, will become even more critical—not just in some far-off future, but from this moment on.

For example, every current study done of newspaper readership comes back with the same result: Readers want bigger text. Most papers now use body text of roughly nine-point type. (This book is set in 11.75-point type.) Readers want twelve-point or larger. And newspapers
are just starting to get it.
The Miami Herald,
I think, was the first major daily to upsize, then the London
Times
went from a broadsheet to a tabloid format, with larger headlines and chubbier font, and in 2007 the
New York Times
actually shrunk the paper size and reduced the number of columns, making the print easier to read, but still uses 8.7-point type. We still have a long way to go, but why did it take this long for them to see us waving at them?

But typeface problems aren't limited to the publishing business. The main market today for drugstores is older people, and that dependence will only increase. Certainly, of all the words we are required to read in the course of our lives, few are more important than the labels, directions and warnings on drugs, both prescription and over the counter. For instance, we have found that 91 percent of all skin care customers buy only after they've read the front label of the box, bottle or jar. Forty-two percent of buyers also read the back of the package. Clearly, reading is crucial to selling skin care and other health and beauty items.

Our studies of drugstore packaging also reveal some interesting comparisons. For instance, the directions, ingredients and/or warning information is ten-point or larger on the packaging for famous brands of hair dye, skin cream, acne medicine and toothpaste. But it's between six-point and nine-point on aspirin and a host of other common analgesics. It is also between six-point and nine-point on cold capsules and other sneezy-stuffy-drippy products, as well as on vitamins. In other words, packaging designers make it much easier for teenagers to read their pimple cream than for seniors to read their headache or cold remedies. The only concession to age we found was on a box of Polident, which uses eleven-point type for directions and eight-point for ingredients.

This is obviously a failing on the part of the wizards in drug companies' packaging divisions. But when you realize that most graphic designers, including those who create labels, are in their twenties, it's easy to see why there has been such a gargantuan miscalculation. The people who make the packaging have no idea how it looks to the people who must read it. Take a gander at publications intended for youthful readers—I mean magazines like
Wired
or
Spin.
In all, the type is tiny and frequently printed on backgrounds that provide little contrast. The
message is clear: This magazine is meant for the young and will make no concessions to decrepitude. It's equivalent to when Mick Jagger, a well-born college graduate, slurred and swallowed his lyrics, rendering his music inaccessible to ears that had grown up on Bing Crosby and Patti Page. In the next century, the disparity of age between designers of drugstore products and their most frequent readers will only broaden.

At some drugstores in Florida, magnifying glasses on chains have been attached to the shelves. This is a clever makeshift solution, but it's not going to be enough. Drugstores report that overall, about one shopper in five seeks employee assistance, but almost double that percentage of senior citizen customers ask for help. Invariably, what they require is the aid of younger eyes to find a product or read a label. You can go through
any
kind of store and find commercial type that's a challenge for aging eyes to read. The nutritional information on the side of a cereal box. The laundering instructions on a silk shirt. The directions on hair dye, a self-test for cholesterol, the manual for a camera or software or a DVD player. The specifications on a computer printer ink-jet cartridge. The song titles on a CD. The size on a pair of golf shoes. The price on a paperback. And how are future customers going to find your business—by reading the telephone book or online directory? I can't read it
now.
And let's not forget restaurant menus, train schedules, government forms, birthday cards, postage stamps, thermometers, speedometers, odometers, the radio dial, the buttons on your washer and dryer and air conditioner and refrigerator, your humidifier, your hot-water heater…Did I mention those little stickers that tell you the pear you just bought is, in fact,
a pear
? How will you ever know? In every instance, the object makes itself forbidding and even hostile to older shoppers by dint of typeface size alone. Today's senior citizens endure this minor form of discrimination without complaint, as their lot in life. But old boomers, accustomed to having existence itself tailored to their specifications, surely will rebel. By 2025, anything smaller than thirteen-point type will be a form of commercial suicide. Even today, as our vision begins to blur, using nine-point type qualifies as a self-destructive tendency.

But did you notice the dilemma here? The better educated (and therefore better off) the shopper, the more he or she makes decisions
based on what's written on labels, boxes and jars. In fact, all retailing depends on the written word now more than ever before. That would seem to call for putting as much information on products, packaging and merchandising materials as possible. But when designers are told to squeeze in more type, they usually do so by making it smaller. Maybe bigger packages are a solution (although that would cause its own difficulties when it's time to allocate shelf space, not to mention the waste of more good trees). Maybe labels should make greater use of graphic images. Maybe it's time for bigger and better signs or talking display fixtures. It might come in the form of a prompt sent to our cell phones or BlackBerries. Or better yet, a completely re-thought-out union of package and instructions—environmentally friendly, with recyclable containers and instructions printed on renewable hemp paper. Maybe we should try all of the above, because we're going to need a culture-wide jump in type size before long.

And size isn't the only optical consideration. The yellowing of the aging cornea means that certain subtle gradations of color will become invisible to a large part of the population. So, for instance, more people than ever will trip up (or fall down) stairs as the clear distinction between step and riser disappears. The difference between blue and green will become more difficult for many shoppers to perceive, and yellow will be become much trickier for designers to use—
everything
will look a little yellow. As a result, packaging, signs and advertising will have to be designed for maximum contrast, not just for the nuanced interplay of colors. We're going to have to see a lot more black, white and red and a lot less of any other hue.

For instance, we tested merchandising materials for a large California savings bank, and while interviewing departing customers, we found that a large poster on the wall behind the tellers had low recall among older patrons. The poster, which promoted the bank's Visa Gold card, showed an oversized credit card sitting atop a gold brick. To us, the image was clear. To older eyes, though, the distinction between the card and the gold was invisible, so it looked like a single large, mysterious yellow shape—a meaningless poster, to many people over sixty-five. We studied signage at a major New York hotel and realized that the color
scheme for the room numbers, gold lettering on an off-white background, was making the place difficult to navigate for old eyes.

Finally, the typical fifty-year-old's retinas receive about one quarter less light than the average twenty-year-old's. That means lots of stores, restaurants and banks should be brighter than they are now. There can't be pockets of dim light, not if shoppers are going to see what they're shopping or even where they're walking. Illumination must be bright, especially during those times of day when older shoppers tend to arrive. And again, all print will have to be bold and high contrast—dark colors on white (or light) backgrounds.

Why is it that winemakers have begun thinking of their labels as art projects? From Kroger to Trader Joe's, we've documented a kazillion people struggling to read labels. It's even worse at your local liquor store, where the lighting tends to be dimmer than in the big chains and the shelves can be downright gloomy. I'm not suggesting that a label can't be pretty or have a kangaroo on it, just that a bottle has to be picked up and glanced at before it gets bought. This is particularly important for small and up-and-coming vintners. Type of wine, country of origin, year, vineyard and a marketing plug—this is all stuff customers are looking for. Proven snotty French brands can do what they want, but all those superb newcomers to the global wine market from Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand need to pay attention.

One of our fast-food clients realized that diners over fifty-five were their fastest-growing demographic, despite the fact that the menu boards used type that was almost impossible for older people to see well. The company redesigned the menus using large photos of the food, and even though it meant listing fewer items, sales rose.

Changing the visual world to accommodate aging eyes will be easy compared to the structural alterations that are going to be required. Even in the twenty-first century, old people will be creaky. And keep in mind that senior citizenship is going to last longer than anyone ever imagined—we'll be old for decades, many of us, longer in some cases than we were young. The same world will have to be navigable by robust sixty-five-year-olds and rickety eighty-five-year-olds. Twenty years ago
many of the newly retired bought retirement condos in seaside areas, and some of those apartments were two-or three-story walkups with ocean-view porches—perfect aeries to while away your golden years, it seemed. Now, however, two decades later, many of those springy-gaited sixtysomethings are wheelchair-bound or otherwise unable to climb, rendering those getaways obsolete. How will our stores and streets and malls fare when today's swarms of baby carriages are replaced by motorized wheelchairs? Doorways, elevators, aisles, cash register areas, restaurant tables, bathrooms, airplanes, trains, buses and private cars will all have to be considerably wider than they are now. Ramps will be required by commercial considerations if not by government fiat. Stairs will be relics. Escalators and moving sidewalks will have to be redesigned and in some cases slowed down. Think of all the multilevel malls that by 2025 will seem inconvenient, if not downright impossible, to one fifth of the population. Remember, older shoppers will be everywhere then, at the drugstore but also at the Gap and Ralph Lauren and Toys “R” Us and Starbucks and Borders, the brand names on which tomorrow's codgers—we—came of age. Once manufacturers start making stylish, sporty motorized wheelchairs (they'll be more like street-ready one-person golf carts) and sleek, European-styled walkers, we'll really see the difference. We'll need cops to direct pedestrian traffic.