There are 27 shopping days until Christmas.

And if any of the shoppers ambling through the expansive aisles of Burnaby’s Metropolis at Metrotown are feeling the pressure of the countdown, they’re not showing it. A young woman sends a stilletto-heeled boot tumbling from its perch on a table just inside the entrance to a shoe store. An elderly Asian couple sits on a padded bench overlooking Santa’s castle in the Grand Court, reading their Chinese-language newspapers, oblivious to the hubbub around them. A shopper pauses at a window display of stylish white and bejeweled watches, then moves on. A dark-haired young mother uses the wide ledge of an empty marble fountain to change the diaper on her squirming baby.

Shopping may seem a haphazard, random experience, flitting from one store to the next, pausing at this display or that one to sniff the perfume or fondle a cashmere sweater, taking a break at the food court for lunch, impulses feeding upon wants feeding upon needs. But every aspect of the mall experience has been programmed.

Resistance is futile

“If you think you can walk into a mall and have free will, forget it,” says Vancouver historian John Atkin, who is in the process of developing a walking tour of Burnaby’s sprawling Metropolis at Metrotown shopping mall. “The design of shopping has been so well studied, you are studied, your shopping habits are studied.”

Shopping has become one of our favourite recreational activities. Academic studies have found it satisfies our need for sensory stimulation, social contact and diversion. In fact, the act of shopping can often be more gratifying than the actual purchases made.

The first modern shopping mall opened just 55 years ago, in Edina, Minnesota. The Southdale mall was the first shopping centre to turn its back on the street, orienting all the stores inward to a totally-enclosed, climate-controlled environment. Life magazine called its 72 stores—including two department stores at either end as anchors, expansive garden court in the centre, decorated with a fishpond, trees and a big cage filled with colourful birds—“The Splashiest Center in the U.S.”

Time magazine called it “a pleasure-dome-with-parking.”

The International Council of Shopping Centres, the international trade association that represents shopping centre owners, developers, marketers, managers and investors, now has more than 60,000 members in over 80 countries. There are 56 malls in Metro Vancouver alone.

Burnaby’s Metropolis at Metrotown is the second largest mall in Canada, the largest in B.C. Its 470 stores and services occupy almost 1.8 million square feet. It attracts more than 18 million shoppers every year.

And every one of them will be subtly, inexorably guided towards one goal: spending money.

“It is a very finely tuned experience,” says Atkin.

Shopping by design

That experience begins the moment you enter the doors.

Those entrance doors are a retail death zone. Shoppers need to acclimatize, get their bearings when they enter a mall; by that time, they’ve already passed a number of storefronts. So that’s why services like banks, insurance agents, dentists, shoe repair, are usually located just inside the entrances.

“Those are the things that aren’t dependent on impulse shopping,” says Atkin.

The weather outside may be dark and frightful, but it’s always bright and warm in the mall. Not too warm, though.

“You do a lot of work when you walk the mall,” says Atkin. “You’ve got to keep the light levels, noise levels and temperature levels at a point where people are still comfortable, but it can’t get too warm.”

Skylights are placed so that direct sunlight never shines into the mall to create reflections on shop windows, obscuring the displays. The intensity of interior lights varies according to the ambient light through the day to keep light levels in the mall constant; time never seems to pass when you’re in the mall.

Moving shoppers through the mall is one of the most important elements of its design, says Atkin. “If you’re coming into the mall and you have a very specific need, most people would come in with that intent, but at some point the pace of the mall will slow you down, there’s just so much going on, you’re distracted and you’re gonna end up sucked into it.”

A constant work in progress

Most malls are designed so that shoppers have to make at least one turn to get into the meat of the shopping, explains Atkin. “Once you’re in, you can look down the mall and see the stores, but there’s no sense of immediate exits. There’s lots of bends and turns. You’re not sure of where you are. It’s an infinite loop.”

Stretches of stores are rarely more than 1,000 feet long—the equivalent of three city blocks—before they’re broken up by hubs like center courts, because researchers have found that’s about the limit of shoppers’ attention spans.

Railings in multi-storey malls are transparent so shoppers can be tantalized by the store displays below or above them. Escalators to access those stores are placed to encourage shoppers to circulate.

Most malls are two storeys. That’s because a shopper who walks the entire mall, following the traffic pattern set out by the placement of the escalators in a two-storey mall will end up right back where they started; but in a three-storey mall, they’ll end up at the opposite end.

The placement of stores within the mall is also no accident, says Atkin. Many malls try to create clusters of similar or complementary retailers to exploit shoppers’ instincts to comparison shop or accessorize. Mall managers will routinely move stores to improve their fortunes, or to bolster underperforming sections of the mall. And no retailer wants to be next to a bank, because a bank in a mall is visually boring, and shoppers breeze right past them, missing the stores immediately adjacent.

“It’s a constant revision, looking at the program and plan and everything else,” says Atkin.

Welcoming the outside world

Malls are always renovating, latching onto the latest trends in retail design, trying to keep the shopping experience fresh, keep them coming back.

“If you have an investor that really has a successful mall, you never see it remain static,” says Atkin. “You never see a mall look old-fashioned.”

That sense of newness can be achieved by something as simple as placing live plants throughout the mall, which grow and change. Or new floor treatments. Or decorations to reflect the changing seasons. Or wholesale renovations. All three of Burnaby’s malls have undergone extensive renovations in the past five years, as has the Royal City Centre in New Westminster.

One of the latest trends in shopping mall design is to open them up again to the outside world with expansive windows or adding outward-facing stores around the mall’s exterior to capture the attention of people driving by.

Malls are also trying to become more comfortable, so shoppers stay longer, says Atkin. They’ve added rest areas with plush, comfortable chairs and couches to encourage shoppers to rest or just hang out. Some malls even equip those areas with big screen televisions so men can watch sports on a Saturday afternoon while their partners shop.

“That’s where you can park dad while you look at shoes,” says Atkin. “It all works to draw you in. And if you come in and stay, you will eventually shop.”

The same thing is happening with the ubiquitous food court. Gone are the days when some malls used chairs in their food courts that were shorter in front to make shoppers uncomfortable and get them back shopping again. The new food courts are becoming destinations themselves with a greater mix of food options, a variety of comfortable seating and arrangements that encourage groups to gather or allow individuals their solitude, even fireplaces and video monitors showing news clips.

“There’s a psychology there that you’re getting useful stuff as well,” says Atkin of the news programming. “There’s a sense of bonding with the mall, that the mall offers everything.”

The modern mall has become “the quasi European town centre,” says Atkin. “You’re supposed to go to the mall and hang out, go to the mall and shop, go to the mall and eat, go watch a movie. They feed the notion of ‘what are we doing today? We’re going to the mall.’ It suddenly fulfills all those functions a downtown traditionally did.”

The mall shouldn’t be all

Including some of the traditional functions of community.

Many malls host community organizations like seniors clubs. Some have outreach programs and daycares. And rarely a weekend goes by without some sort of event in a mall’s centre court, like performances by school choirs, fashion shows, art exhibitions, and, at this time of year, Santa Claus.

“Malls have now become the destination themselves,” says Atkin. “The mall is the centre of town.”

But that can come with a price. Communities that abdicate the responsibility for creating public gathering space to mall developers risk stifling free speech and advocacy because malls are still private enterprises.

“If there’s not an alternative public space, then it’s not healthy,” says Atkin. “We have to be good at creating public space that works in concert with the semi-public space of a mall.”

Another load of shoppers streams across the pedestrian bridge linking the SkyTrain station to Metropolis at Metrotown. The Metrotown stop is the second busiest on SkyTrain, handling an average of 18,000 people each day. Many of them are heading to the mall doors with a sense of discovery, a sense of adventure.

“I think the expectation is when you go to the mall, you’ll be able to find stuff,” says Atkin. “They have that promise of discovery, that sense of ‘let’s just walk the mall and see what’s here.’ And I guess maybe there’s a bit of that element of ‘gee, maybe my dreams will be fulfilled.’”

SHOPPING 101

The science of studying shoppers’ behaviour is called retail anthropology. Many principles that guide shopping mall design are also applied to individual retailers, like Levi-Strauss, Starbucks, McDonalds, Blockbuster and Apple Computer, who have employed retail anthropologists to help them optimize design and traffic flow for maximum profit. Using teams of clandestine observers and footage from hidden cameras, retail anthropologists know:

• It takes shoppers five to 15 paces to slow down when they enter a store and refocus their attention on items in that store. Once in, most turn their attention to the right, so the optimal sales location is in a ways, at a 45-degree angle to the right of the entrance.

• Perfume displays are at the front of department stores even though shoppers are likely to rush right past them as they adjust, but smell is such a powerful sense, they’re likely to remember the scents and get drawn to the sales counters when they’re leaving the store.

• Shoppers don’t like to be brushed or jostled when they’re checking out displays. Merchandise too close together will send shoppers fleeing.

• Shoppers like to touch and feel the merchandise they’re buying; that’s why there’s a table of sweaters in clothing stores.

• Staple items, like jeans in a Gap, or milk in the supermarket, are often at the back of stores, forcing shoppers to walk all the way through to get what they went in for in the first place, hopefully giving in to temptation along the way.

• Men feel uncomfortable in the women’s clothing sections, but women have no problem in men’s wear, so unisex clothing stores that are oriented front to back will put the men’s clothes at the front. To avoid that problem, most stores orient their clothing to the left and right.

• Stores design their window displays to catch the eye of the shopper approaching it on the near side of the aisle from at least 25 feet away.