Call of the Mall

The Author of Why We Buy on the Geography of Shopping

Paco Underhill

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9780743258296
• Subtopic: Comportamento dei consumatori
• Index: Business

The author of the international bestseller Why We Buy—praised by The New York Times as “a book that gives this underrated skill the respect it deserves”—now takes us to the mall, a place every American has experienced and has an opinion about.

Paco Underhill, the Margaret Mead of shopping and author of the huge international bestseller Why We Buy, now takes us to the mall, a place every American has experienced and has an opinion about. The result is a bright, ironic, funny, and shrewd portrait of the mall—America’s gift to personal consumption, its most powerful icon of global commercial muscle, the once new and now aging national town square, the place where we convene in our leisure time.

It’s about the shopping mall as an exemplar of our commercial and social culture, the place where our young people have their first taste of social freedom and where the rest of us compare notes. Call of the Mall examines how we use the mall, what it means, why it works when it does, and why it sometimes doesn’t.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by Paco Underhill
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 America Shops
• 2 You Are Here
• 3 A Mouse Hole
• 4 Dude, Where’s My Car?
• 5 Why Malls Fear Freedom
• 6 I Brake for Meanderthals
• 7 Nose and Toes
• 8 Sex and the Mall
• 9 The Charmin Challenge
• 10 Status Anxiety and Back Pockets
• 11 Fun
• 12 Hands-Free Shopping
• 13 Pushcarts Rule
• 14 Mall Cuisine
• 15 Breakfast at Cartier
• 16 A Man and His Mall
• 17 Who Is Your Dad?
• 18 Malls of the World
• 19 Where the Girls Are
• 20 The Mall Touch
• 21 Short Hills or Seoul?
• 22 Other Venues
• 23 Scenes from a Mall
• 24 The Postmall World
• Endcap
• Acknowledgments