The 12 (Shopping) Days of Christmas

Retailers are down to the last 12 shopping days before Christmas, and I find I’m receiving an increasing number of emails from them daily. In some cases, it’s double the number, as retailers send emails for both their full line stores and outlets. While the whole check-out-who’s-offering-the deepest-discounts made for interesting sport over the Thanksgiving weekend, and certainly enticed me to participate in the Cyber Monday challenge, now it’s  just filling up my inbox and creating a lot of unwanted noise.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done my fair share of online shopping this season, but I’ve found the experience has pushed me back into stores. There’s just nothing like being inspired by something you see, to hold the product in your hands and to see what it looks like when you try it on. But beyond this simple and well known dynamic, what I’ve found most frustrating about the online experience is not knowing where to start once I get on the site. I’ve taken to filtering by designer, but then I feel like I’m missing something. And it gets overwhelming when I get an unfiltered result that presents me with over 2000 choices. I was surfing several sites the other day, and gave up once the exasperation set in. It’s no longer the quick and easy alternative for me that it once was.

The nice thing about living and working where I am is that there are endless shopping alternatives. My daughter had last Monday off for some unknown reason, so I took the day off too, and we had ourselves a mommy/daughter shopping day. I wanted to go to Bergen Town Center (the lure of bargains is always my Achilles heel), but my daughter wanted to go to Garden State Plaza Mall. She won. We spent about three hours there, with an hour respite in the middle for a late lunch at California Pizza Kitchen. I do have to say thank you to mall operators for adding “real” restaurants into the mix. I mean, after all, food courts are so 1980s.

Given the scale of this mall and the breadth of its offering, we strategized our destinations and mapped our assault. However, we found that despite all our careful planning to maximize exposure with the most efficient routing, we ended up dropping off the last few stores on our itinerary on account of sheer exhaustion. We did manage to do some damage to the credit cards, but our patronage was limited to retailers we know best. Again, the choices were too vast and we needed to filter the offering.

So what does this all mean? Choice is supposed to be good, right? But the Internet has gotten enormous, just as malls have gotten enormous, and I think they’ve now arrived at the same place as brick-and-mortar department stores have been for years: how to be perceived as offering something special in the overwhelming face of quantity. But department stores – some of them anyway – have gotten their act together and have regained ground with customers, utilizing the omnichannel approach and social media.

So I had to ask myself: is it really the retailers, or is it me? I think I’m pretty typical, probably working about 50 hours a week, always plugged in, and whatever spare time I have, I try to spend with my kid and get my household in order – and not necessarily in that order. Like most people, I have little-to-no free time, and constantly find myself running to stay in place. The holidays just make it worse.

So if digital is supposed to make our lives easier, why hasn’t it? I suspect the answer is we haven’t gotten there yet – or maybe – I haven’t gotten there yet. I want all this technology and social media to filter my choices, advise me on the hot new stores, tell me who has the best deals on things I like to buy, and update me about in-store events I would like to attend. But I don’t want a million emails from a whole bunch of different (and sometimes the same) retailers. I don’t need any more emails, believe me. I’ll concede that maybe this exists out there to some degree, but I’m sure it’s a limited use application, and it’s definitely not all tied up with a bow in one simple app to be all things I want it to be. That’s what I want for Christmas.

Kathleen Jordan, AIA, CID, LEED AP, is a principal in Gensler’s New York office, and a leader of its retail practice with over 24 years of experience across the United States and internationally. Jordan has led a broad range of retail design projects as both an outside consultant and as an in-house designer. She has led projects from merchandising and design development all the way through construction documentation and administration, and many of her projects have earned national and international design awards. Contact her at kathleen_jordan@gensler.com.