Adrianna Jones
Assignment 2: First Draft:
“Sweatpants in Paradise: The exciting world of immersive retail”
It’s funny how the shopping experience seems to scheme us each time we go
shopping. Typically when we shop for one thing we find ourselves purchasing many
other items that we simply don’t need. In “Sweatpants in Paradise”, the author Molly
Young explains this effect as that of a “wormhole of shopping”. Young explains how the
wormhole of shopping is continually changing to appeal, gain, and keep customersimmersive retail.
In her short essay, Young goes into detail about how malls, department stores, and
in particular the Hollister Co. flagship store in New York strategizes to grab customers.
In Young’s opening she begins by referring that it is likely to determine the depth of an
experience by sense of time. She states a few examples and then proposal that shopping is
one of them. For example, when you enter the mall during the day and after hours of
shopping or “window shopping”, you quickly realize how late in the evening it has
become. Young gives other enlightening examples of how many other things also appeal
to the shopping experience, such as décor, the smell of Cinnabon, and the sound of music.
Since living in New York, Young is quite unfamiliar with the environment of a
“mall”. All which she encounters on a trip to San Francisco centre with her dad to
exchange a pair of velour pants before heading back to New York. “Bonafide malls do
not exist at the center of New York City, but mall-size stores do”, states Young. Thinking
about her experience at San Francisco Centre, Young thought about the many “mall-like”
stores in New York-the Hollister Flagship store which she learned of through a friend
while in San Francisco. The friend talked of how she too was sucked into the shopping
wormhole but at this store which sparked Young’s interests for wanting to see exactly
what this store was really like-if it too were just like her experience at the Centre.
“It’s the whole mall in a store”, young explains after a trip to the Hollister store.
She analyzed the whole store, from the employees that were selective based on their
looks to the sound-track played that sounds like the music that popular kids would play in
movies. What astounded her most was the fact that this California themed store had
nothing to do with the origins of its named or exactly the significance of the year 1922
displayed on its logo seeing that Hollister was established in 2000 in Columbus, Ohio.
Young after this wondered why the chose of name-Hollister? If it didn’t get its name
from the City its self then why does the décor seem so familiar? Why is it cool? It lead to
a PDF file see founded online that referred to a tactic known as immersive retail.
In Young’s essay she defines immersive retail as strategy that aims to destabilize
a current trend in customer behavior known as commoditization-a circumstance in which
consumers only care about an item’s price. Immersive retail aims to promote memorable,
interactive, and emotional experiences, world circulating around the customer instead of
the merchandise. Young argues that this is the very reason why malls and “mall-like”
stores operate as they do. Her observations of Hollister and how the projections of
Huntington Beach and sexual appeal of the employees is a pure example of how this
strategy is set up to work. However, is immersive retail the only reason behind the
operation of such stores? In the opening of her essay, Young states that the shopping
wormhole affects everyone differently in particular people under thirty-five. This
suggests that if immersive retail is used for a general age group then there are also many
other tactics being put to use for complying ages.