Trip to Woodland Mall

On my trip to Woodland mall I started looking for things that I hadn’t noticed before after reading the article by John Pahl. I noticed the calm background music that is playing in the background through out the mall. I always knew that there were plants in the mall, but I did not notice the large amount that there was. One thing that I had never realized before that might be obvious is that the kiosks are placed in the middle was that you are given no other option but to walk along the sides or through certain sections in the middle. This causes a person to be forced to go either to the stores or the kiosks, which will more likely draw them in and it helps when the employees to be able to draw people into their stores. When a group of us walked past the kiosks the employees working there began to ask us questions to draw us in. In the movie The Persuaders it talks about how advertisement is everywhere and that is definitely true in the mall. In every single store that I walked past there was tons of advertisements about sales and saying to draw someone into the store. The signs were sometimes huge to draw attention and then once inside the store the there were smaller, but still caught the eye. The signs were typically big, bold, and bright. The employees are even walking advertisements, when talking with an employee at footlocker she said that 4 out of the 5 items of clothing she was wearing were footlocker and she even admitted she was a walking advertisement. It was interesting to look around and focus on noticing the advertisements because there everywhere and I hadn’t noticed how many there were before. One of the advertisements that was hanging up in footlocker was celebrities who wear those types of shoes, this would draw people in because they want to have the shoes that the star athletes in hopes that they play like them or act like them. It was also interesting to think about why certain things were in the mall. When looking into stores there were lights that were put directly over a sale or a new item to draw a person to look at them. Another thing that I thought was interesting is that they set up play-places for children to keep people at the mall for longer periods of time, so that after the children got to play for a little bit then the parents get to go back to shopping. I noticed that sometimes they conveniently place an adult store next to a children store so that they can tell the child when will go into their store once they are done with there own. Overall reading the chapter by John Pahl and watching The Persuaders helped me pick out things that normally I would not notice.