Best Buy

Best Buy was the second store I visited.  I already explained how I look at stores differently in my first store posting about Target so I won’t go into that again.  I’ll just go over the things I observed about Best Buy.

My second store I visited was Best Buy.  Best buy is a major electronics retail chain located at 7100 Santa Monica Blvd in a shopping center.  The same shopping center as Target actually.  The store is a major big box electronics and appliance store.  Its main competitors are Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, and a few other online retailers.     

Best Buy has had a presence since its inception in 1966 as Sound of Music which later changed its name to the current name Best Buy in 1989.  Best Buy has  locations in the United States and operates stores in several other countries.  It also is a major employer with over 178,000 employees.  Their revenue according to Wikipedia is $49.183 Billion.  Their revenue is down significantly due to major competition from the competitors I listed above.

Best Buy’s main shopper is one that is looking for appliances, televisions, computers, computer products, and other consumer electronic products such as cell phones.     When you enter the store from the ground level of the shopping center on La Brea and Romaine (street down from Santa Monica Blvd, but in the same shopping center as Target).   Their decompression zone doesn’t really exist.  You walk through two sets of sliding glass doors and as soon as you enter the store on your left hand side is a person that greets you and checks your receipts as you leave the store.    That is mainly their decompression zone.   The lighting when you enter is in contrast to the lighting outside, much brighter.  There are electronics all around you that are turned on and showing different things to show off their quality products.  Directly in front of us when we enter the store is CD’s and Movies and the less expensive products that people normally don’t go to Best Buy for anymore.  To the left of that is their mobile phone section which people seem to use Best Buy for their mobile phone purchases a lot.   That section is always busy and filled with customers buying cell phones and cell phone products.  Butt-Brushing in this store is not something that regularly occurs,  as they are electronics and fragile they are spaced apart so people can get a grasp on say what the television would look like from a certain distance away, like if they were to place it in their living room.  I notice in the store what could be considered petting, but more of handling going on of different electronics products.   Whether it be a computer, tablet, cell phone, tv remote, video gaming system, there is plenty of touching and viewing going on in this store.

Going through Best Buy for me and it seems like a lot of other customers is a complicated thing, as things are not placed really accordingly to Underhill’s theory.  TV’s are to the right, appliances to the left, but both are in the back so you need to go through the more inexpensive things that you may not have come for but end up buying when you go through the store.  The computers are in the far back, which are a big part of their sales.  TV’s and Computers make up most of Best Buy’s major purchases.  I have myself bought numerous of both there.   Best Buy does an ok of utilizing Underhill’s strategies but I think it is hard for them to figure out where to place all the electronics.  Mostly they place the best- selling products in the most visible places.  

Target

I am in Target on almost a daily basis and ever since I read the article on Paco Underhill I have not been able to look at the layout of any store the same way or think the same way when I shop as I used to.  I look at how everything is placed, I look at where it is place, how closely together, I watch how the customers shop, I watch what they put in the cart, I watch the children beg their parents for something to buy.  All these articles we read on shopping really made me think a lot differently about a store than I used to.

My first store I visited was Target.  A major retail chain located at 7100 Santa Monica Blvd in a shopping center.  The store is a major discount chain and Target has an international presence being based out of Minneapolis, MN.   It sells everything from food to clothing to electronics to beauty supplies and a pharmacy.   Their clothing is not upscale it is more for the price conscious shopper.  The food is discounted and is a competitor of major food chains.  Their electronics are mid-range as well as mid-priced.  

Target has had a presence since its inception in 1902 as Dayton’s which later changed its name to the current name Target.  Target has 1,788 locations in the United States and operates 82 in Canada as of September, 2013.  It also is a major employer with over 300,000 employees.  Their revenue according to Wikipedia is $73.301 Billion.

Target’s main shopper is one that is looking for a good deal and something cheaper in price than say Rite-Aid or CVS.   They are major competitors with Wal-Mart for shoppers.   When you enter the store from the 2nd level of the shopping center on Santa Monica Blvd and La Brea, the first thing you see to your left is their bargain, discounted bins with things very cheap for sale.  That is mainly their decompression zone.   The lighting when you enter is in contrast to the lighting outside, much brighter, and shinier.   Directly after walking through the decompression zone of miscellaneous trinkets and bargain prices.  The next thing you see right in front of you to the right (remember American shoppers tend to shop to the right) is their jewelry and sunglasses, which appeal to the women shoppers, who seem to be the biggest shoppers.  As we continue to the right of the store, like Underhill points out, we find the women’s and children’s clothing as well as shoes.  We find the clothes in the store placed on racks closely together, you cannot help but butt-brushing as Underhill called it against something and looking at it.  I was cutting through the children’s section to get to the Electronics section when I butt-brushed a bunch of little girls dresses and knocked them off the rack.  As I picked them up, I thought to myself, if I knew a little girl or had a niece I would love to buy her that.   That’s where I see Underhill’s butt-brushing and petting really coming into play.  Because I picked up the dresses and felt the material and thought it was nice. 

Continuing through the store I see how things are placed, the more expensive items are in the back so you must go through the entire store to get to something in the electronics, which makes you think that you need to buy something you necessarily don’t need to buy.  I can never go to Target for just one thing without ending up with a cartload of stuff when I only went to the store to buy cat food, which also is conviently placed in the back of the store also, so I have to go through the entire store and see things I think I need.  Most of the people I observed in the store could navigate the layout of the store as easily as me, making me think that they had shopped there before.  Target is a place that a lot of people do come to more than just once or twice, since it’s not really a specialty store and has everything.  I observed people doing the same actions as me, butt-brushing, petting, saying things like “Oh, I need one of these too.”  I say that all the time when I am in there.  I think Target utilizes Underhill’s strategies extremely well.   They get the shopper to buy more than what they came for. 

The authors in “Signs of Life in the USA” use the example of vampires to define signs and signifiers in the United States.   We first see things like Brahm Stoker’s Dracula, who is a hideous evil vampire, to a shift to vampires being beautiful, almost ordinary people in such a movie like the Twilight.   He calls this shift “a sig, a signifier of a profound change in American onsciousness marked by the difference between a vampire story whose entertainment value lies in the purshit and destruction of a literally bloodthirsty demon and one that is essentially a romance within which vampires are the romantic leads.”   That authors define these signs and signifiers in which the relationships within a “system.”  Signs and signifiers relate to the concept of Pop Culture because we can take apart pop culture and examine what is making it popular.

Folk culture is explained as “low” culture constituted to the culture of the masses.  It was more for the common folk.  Mass culture is the commercialation of culture to appeal the masses.   Folk culture is dying out more and more each year and mass culture is coming in more and more each year.  With the big studios and big corporations trying to appeal to the masses.   They relate to pop culture in a major was, because appealing to the masses is what pop culture is.

Because every culture leaves a blip on the semiotic radar screen this method is used to analyze pop culture. We can take anything apart from a television show, to a commercial, to a movie and analyze and decode it.  We can find the meaning, the connation and denotation of the signs and signifiers and the systems which they belong in.  We can really find the meaning of a show or whatever pop culture we are talking about.  It’s actually very exciting to look at the deeper meaning of whatever in pop culture we are looking at.  We can find the hidden meanings behind everything.

            Vampires have to be one of the hottest topics in today’s pop culture.  They seem to be everywhere we turn and people are loving them.  From True Blood to the Twilight Saga they have that allure of beautiful, immortal, God like creatures who are not necessarily the vampires some of us grew up with.   We can use semiotics to look at what the meaning behind this is.  We can look where the beginning of vampires came from and what exactly evolved them and how they evolved into these creatures we lust to see and to watch and even some of the people want to me.  We can use semiotics to examine the system the signs and signifiers belong into in our culture and just how they got to be so popular.