Want to do something fun? Sorry, not today.

We’re a few snowy days from February 27, otherwise known as Open That Bottle Night. The night was invented by the two Wall Street Journal wine columnists -- in their words, “You know that bottle of wine you've been keeping around for that special occasion that never arrives or because the wine is always going to be better tomorrow? Open that bottle!”

Curious, because you might think we wouldn’t need to be prodded into taking part in something as pleasurable as a bottle of wine.

A recent New York Times article by John Tierney explored the surprisingly widespread human tendency to procrastinate pleasure. We wait to use gift cards, wait to redeem frequent flier miles, and endlessly put off visiting our own hometown tourist attractions. According to a study conducted by Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, professors of marketing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego, people who have moved to Chicago, Dallas and London visit fewer local landmarks during their first year than the typical tourist visits during a short stay. The only time Chicagoans run around visiting local attractions is just before they are about to move out of town. The same professors gave people gift certificates for movie tickets and French pastries. Some of the certificates expired in a few weeks, while others didn’t expire for two months. The people who got the longer term certificates were more confident they would redeem the gifts, but less likely to actually pull the trigger. It turns out we overestimate how much free time we’ll have in the future. And we become overly focused on imagining idealized scenarios, in which we paint pictures of achieving maximum value and pleasure from miles, gift cards, or bottles of red—without acting to turn these “magical thinking” thought processes into realities.

The Times suggests consumers learn from this research and quickly cash in gift certificates and miles, and that we stop procrastinating pleasure. There might be a few lessons for retailers as well – while customers (and legislators) say they want gift cards that don’t expire, deadlines are actually in the customer’s best interest. Also, this counter-intuitive behavior among gift card holders suggests there might be new, interesting information to be discovered in how shoppers use gift cards. Interesting insights could be well be found in a study using video analytics and shop alongs among gift card users vs. other shoppers to determine particular shopping styles, store penetration, freneticism, overbuying, and more.

Retail guilt trip

If you’ve gone to Safeway recently, or Brooks Brothers, or CVS, or any number of other retailers, you’ve been hit up for donations at the cash register. In an article on this retail arm-twisting, The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Felten wisely observes, if he does not donate, “there's the reflexive twinge of shame. Are these the emotions businesses want to produce in their customers?” According to Felten, he talked to a number of retailers and was “assured time and again that customers like being solicited for donations and that no one ever complains about being asked to give.”

Really?

Isn’t there a chance that making customers uncomfortable could send customers running to shop online instead? Retailers are taking a pretty big gamble by not rigorously studying the effects of their charitable efforts on shoppers at the moment of truth.

There’s no doubt these efforts successfully raise funds, and hence provide a tangible benefit. They’re certainly well intentioned. Still, isn’t it a little creepy and invasive? Stores are essentially saying we just saved you some money (maybe as a way of getting you in here to shop in the first place), and now we’re going to ask you to give (and give it) back. Also, as customer, am I going to be a little suspicious of the money actually getting to the right place? Do I know if the retailer is going to deduct some kind of administrative fee for handling the transaction? Or perhaps pocket a healthy tax deduction for their customers’ contributions?

If stores want to encourage customers to give back, why not offer customers the opportunity to contribute without the hard sell? What would happen if a store said we saved you some money today—here’s an envelope (or a number to text), and we’d like to encourage you to send it to St. Jude’s Hospital—or wherever?

Spend this holiday season with Hilbert’s Paradox of the Grand Hotel (and other tales of the precious customer)

19th century German mathematician David Hilbert described the concept of infinity this way: first, you must picture a hotel so vast, so overwhelming that it has an infinite number of guest rooms. This hotel is not only large, it is also full, with every guest room occupied. One evening, a sojourner enters the lobby, seeking a room in this hotel with absolutely no vacancy. Despite being sold out, the traveler gets a room, since the hotel is not limited by any finite number of accommodations. So the guest in room 1 is moved to room 2, the guest in room 2 is moved to room 3, and so forth, ad infinitum. The newcomer is put into room 1. The hotel can repeat this procedure any number of times whenever new clients happen to show up.

Would that this were so for retailers—a steady line of customers snaking out the door, waiting to come in, every section packed, every aisle occupied, a hub of activity 24/7/365, one shopper after another after another with no end in sight.

While this isn’t real, we’ve often observed sales associates who believe that customers are an endless resource. Like it’s no big deal if they don’t sell customer 1, because a customer 2 will be right behind. There’s always one more and one more after that. Take this incident at Best Buy, in which an employee told a customer, without checking, that a hard drive was out of stock. When he ordered the same item online for in-store pickup, less than an hour later, it was miraculously available. Or this customer service fiasco at Men’s Wearhouse, in which a saleswoman insulted a customer with lines like “I don’t know why you’re here,” and “I can’t help you now.” Even in the best of times, it’s foolish not to treat every single customer as if they are critical to the success of the store—because they are. And to do otherwise in this economy, it’s deadly. If enough customers are lured away, whether it’s by lower prices or better service, stores that treat customers as expendable will find themselves on the road to oblivion.

The Crowds of Black Friday

2009 has been another rough year for the retail sector, as it continues to be battered by rising unemployment, pessimistic consumers, and newly thrifty shoppers. As Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season approaches, retail observers are placing their bets. Will customers continue to sit on their wallets, refusing to budge until they see massive discounts? Or will they capitulate in a Christmas shopping frenzy as retailers try to hold the line on prices?

One thing is certain: come Friday, stores will be mobbed as about a quarter of American households shake off their tryptophan-induced stupor and hit the stores (latest one-upsmanship schtick: Old Navy stores will open at 3 a.m., maybe because you can never know the extent of the pent-up demand for cargo pants at that hour of the morning). Last year, Black Friday was marred by a tragic death when a Wal-Mart worker was trampled by an out-of-control bargain-seeking horde. This year, writes the New York Times, stores are taking steps to better manage crowds. The Times reports that Wal-Mart is taking a page from experts who manage throngs at major events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics to prevent crowding. There’s a poetic irony in the fact that as consumers are purportedly pinching pennies, they literally can’t storm the stores fast enough.

Time reports that this year, retailers and shoppers are engaged in a game of chicken as shoppers wait for discounts and retailers try to dig in their heels. But do you think this game of double-dare is the new normal? From now on, might the contest go something like this:

Phase 1: people sit at home on their hands, stubbornly refusing to consume.
Phase 2: retailers put deals and discounts lower and lower and until they finally hit the "magic” percentage off number;
Phase 3: floodgates open; aisles full; cash registers sing; everybody happy; life is good.
Phase 4: retailers quickly repeal the dramatic offers because—oops—they’re too costly.
Phase 5: consumers go back to being unhappy—give retailers the cold shoulder and sit at home, waiting them out until the next time.
Phase 6: see Phase 2.

Agape in the aisle

It all became clear in an interview a few years back with a man named Sherwood Schwartz, the television producer who created the dubious passel of 1970s-era comedy shows like Gilligan’s Island, Beverly Hillbillies, and the Brady Bunch, among others. The interviewer asked him to explain why every one of his shows always began with an expository theme song---a song that would explain in vivid detail the premise of the show (“So this is the tale of the castaways….” and “Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jed….” and “Here’s the story of a lovely lady…”). Schwartz said he believed this was the essential week-in-and-week-out ingredient to the success of his television comedies because, as he put it, “the puzzled cannot laugh.”

Cut to the aisle of your local supermarket. We use video systems to capture and code shopper styles and behaviors in retail stores. This lets us see thousands of repeated behaviors, many of them eye-opening to ourselves and our clients. But whether the study is about diapers, dog food or analgesics, we too often see a hidden segment of shoppers perhaps best described as “the puzzled.” These shoppers stand perfectly still. They stare at the shelf and—I’m not kidding—their mouths are usually open. When it seems like divine Providence will not explode off the shelf to help them find the brand answer they seem to be looking for, the following sequence usually takes place: they reach for a product, they heft it, they turn it over in their hands, they return it to the shelf, they reach for a competitive brand and go through the same “heft, read and regard” routine before putting it back. Then they walk away, shaking their heads ever so slightly (this is one of the reasons we also do intercepts—a way to learn what that whole last bit was all about.)

Obviously marketers need to make sure they’re not losing sales because something about the product or the package or the brand is causing head-scratching in the aisle. But it’s never a bad idea to apply the Schwartz Admonition to the point of sale because of a truth we’ve documented too many times: the puzzled cannot buy.

Fiddling while commuters rush by

A young musician is in a Washington DC metro station. He wears jeans, a long sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. It’s Friday morning. A violin is in his hand. The case is open at his feet. A few coins and dollar bills are inside as seed money to stimulate contribution. At 7:50 am, he begins playing. He continues for 43 minutes. During this time, he plays through six classical pieces, including the stunning Bach Partita in D minor. His music resonates through the entire metro arcade.

About a thousand people pass by. Almost all ignore him. Twenty three of them glance momentarily and wait. Seven people stop to listen for more than a minute. He collects a total of $32.17.

The violinist is Joshua Bell. He is one of the great musical virtuosos of our time. He sells out concert halls. He plays to capacity audiences all over the world . Now, here he is, in the Washington Metro, playing an 18th century Stradivarius violin, and just seven people stop to listen for more than a minute. (Interestingly, according to Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten, who concocted this Pulitzer-prize winning experiment, every time children walked by the performance, they tried to stop and listen. And each time, a parent swooped them up and kept walking.)

What does this experiment show us? It depends on your perspective. Are we too busy to appreciate beauty? Was Bell just a bad busker?

One lesson to draw from the story is how much we can learn from well-designed, rigorous real-world experiments. When the reporter first proposed the experiment, he anticipated that the music would draw a throng, perhaps even create problems with crowd control. Instead, he learned that only a very few classical music fans (and children) would stop to enjoy the music. No focus group or interview would have provided the same insight. More importantly, the experiment demonstrates the central role of context in generating a reaction, whether it’s a crowd of commuters or shoppers. Humans have a hard time assessing product quality on its own merits; rather, the environment powerfully shapes decision making. Imagine if someone were to set out a cheap folding table in downtown Chicago displaying piles beautiful couture shirts with a hand-lettered sign selling them for $10. Most likely, people would ignore the display on their way to Macy’s or Nordstrom, because there would be no cues, such as designer labels, admiring sales associates, or piped in classical music, alerting them that these shirts were in fact valuable. For stores, carefully designed research could help figure out what in the environment causes shoppers to line up and what makes them walk on by.

Back to the hedonic treadmill?

What happens now that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has officially declared the recession “ likely over?” Consumer spending, still sluggish, is finally on the rise. Nobody is yet breaking out the champagne – and as bloggers and cartoonists among others have warned, the economy won’t truly rebound until jobs return, and right now it’s still not a pretty picture. But is a new frugality here to stay, or will we soon return to some of our old ways? It may depend on your rung on the ladder. While working stiffs grabbed private label bread and took staycations, the rich curtailed their purchases of fine art and sold off the private jets. Sure, the recession slammed the fortunes of rich and poor alike – Bill Gates is out $3 billion -- but the families who had $20 million before the recession and then found their assets depleted to $14 million were never in jeopardy of going hungry. To some extent, the wealthy went on a time-limited spending diet because of a jarring hit to their balance sheet, and because for at least a while it appeared unseemly to flaunt lavish purchases when so many people had fallen on hard times.

But here’s a truism which bears repeating: the rich can only hold out for so long. They really do need, or at least, really, really want what others may call non-essentials , like couture, art, and second homes. Once the stigma lessens, as Michael Silverstein of the Boston Consulting Group says, “…the rich will realize they're rich again and start to spend.” According to the 2009 Mendelsohn Affluent Survey, nearly a third of wealthy households purchased fine jewelry and a fifth purchased artwork or collectibles in the past year. As the recession slowly begins to thaw, the rich are very likely to go back to their old acquisitive ways, driving the recovery further and faster.

Luxury brands are salivating at the prospect they can woo affluent shoppers as they trickle back into the store. MarketWatch reports that at the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store, the personal-shopping service area is ready and waiting and lavishly appointed with stunning views. In addition, the store is limiting stock and focusing on exclusive brands and lines. High-end brands are also focusing on offering top-notch quality and design; for example, Restoration Hardware has hiked prices 20 to 30 percent to distinguish its offerings from its lower-quality competitors. Exclusivity and great design have also kept Louis Vuitton and Hermes growing impressively, even during the recession. Some luxury retailers are toning down the flash a little, such as Fabergé, which has launched an online venture to allow shoppers to participate in “inconspicuous consumption.” While some have criticized these attempts to lure back the luxury market with high prices, exclusivity, quality, and discretion, we think they just might be enough to get the rich spending again.

Any chance the well-heeled are going to help spend us out of our troubles?