Gruen effect

The Gruen effect, also called the Gruen transfer, is the moment a shopping trip changes character. You walk in with an errand, and somewhere between the entrance and the store you came for, the errand loosens its grip. The lighting, the displays and the route draw you into browsing, and browsing turns into buying things you had not planned. The term is named after the architect who designed the first fully enclosed shopping mall in the United States. It is a little unfair to him, which is part of the story.

The architect and the mall

Victor Gruen grew up in Vienna, studied architecture there and fled to the United States in 1938, arriving, as he later recalled, “with an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English.” In New York he made his name designing shops on Fifth Avenue, including a storefront with a small arcade at its entrance that drew passers-by in from the sidewalk. In the early 1950s he designed Northland, a large open-air shopping center outside Detroit.

His best-known building opened on October 8, 1956, in Edina, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis. Southdale Center was commissioned by the Dayton’s department store, which wanted a place to shop on the long, cold days when customers stayed home. It cost $20 million and opened with 72 stores and two department stores as anchors. Gruen put the whole complex under one roof, heated in winter and air-conditioned in summer, with blank outer walls and all the activity facing inward. Stores sat on two levels joined by escalators, and in the middle was a skylit garden court with a fishpond, sculpted trees, a large birdcage and a café. Nearly every regional mall built in America since follows the same pattern.

Gruen did not mean it to stand alone. His plan placed Southdale at the heart of a 463-acre development with apartments, houses, schools, a medical center, a park and a lake, a new town center for car-bound suburbs. In Shopping Towns USA, the 1960 book he wrote with Larry Smith, he described shopping centers as places that could give suburban community life a center. The surrounding town was never built. What spread was the box in a sea of parking.

Late in life, Gruen disowned the result. Revisiting one of his old centers, he complained of the seas of parking that had spread around it, and in a 1978 speech in London he said he refused to pay alimony for the developments built from his ideas. By then he had moved back to Vienna, where a large new mall south of the city was drawing trade from its independent shops.

Where the name comes from

Gruen did not coin the phrase, and the record does not show exactly who did. It grew up later in retail and design talk as shorthand for the point at which a shopper’s plan dissolves into wandering. Pinning it on Gruen suggests he set out to disorient people, which misreads his aims. He wanted a civic center, and he spent his last years attacking what malls had become.

But the name is not pure invention. In Shopping Towns USA, Gruen and Smith advised planners to scatter small, tempting shops, such as candy, gift and card stores, throughout a center so that shoppers would meet as many chances to buy on impulse as possible, and their glossary defined an impulse purchase as anything a shopper had not decided on before the trip. The design that steers shoppers was part of the plan from the start, even if the darker reading of it was not.

Why design changes what we buy

A plan held in your head competes with everything in front of your eyes. Long routes put more goods in view, and every display is a small new reason to stop. Pleasant surroundings make lingering easy, and the longer you stay, the more chances there are for something to catch your attention. Once one unplanned item is in the bag, the trip has already changed from an errand into an outing.

How a short errand becomes a chain

You drive to the mall for a $25 phone charger. The garage feeds you in at the far end, so the walk passes a department store and a jacket in a window that would go with everything. You buy the jacket for $140, and the shoes beside it look like they belong to it, so you add $90. By the time you reach the phone store you have been walking for forty minutes, so there is lunch at the food court. You leave with the charger, having spent $280 on a $25 errand.

How mall builders steer the route

Mall developers have been candid about the craft. Alfred Taubman, one of the country’s leading mall builders, explained to Malcolm Gladwell in 2004 why so many malls have two levels with escalators at the ends: a shopper who goes up at one end and comes down at the other passes every store and ends up back where they started. He described open storefronts that remove what he called threshold resistance, the small barrier between the walkway and the inside of a store, and extra lighting by the skylights so that dusk does not remind shoppers it is time to go home.

• Anchors at the ends pull shoppers past everything in between.
• Loops and escalators route the trip through every store.
• Open storefronts remove the step of deciding to go in.
• Impulse shops along the route offer small, easy purchases.

How to keep a trip short

1. Write the errand down. One line, one store. Anything else waits for another day.
2. Plan your entrance. Check which entrance or parking level is closest to the store you need, and use it.
3. Set a time limit. Decide how long the trip should take, and leave when it is up.
4. Note, do not buy. If something catches your eye, take a photo and decide at home. Most of it will not survive the drive back, and the 30-day rule handles what does.

Where it meets the Diderot effect

Malls and showrooms are full of finished sets: the mannequin dressed head to toe, the room staged down to the cushions. Those sets are the Diderot effect put on display, showing you the new thing already surrounded by everything it will make you want. The Gruen effect gets you in front of them, and the Diderot effect does the rest. Our page on how marketers use the Diderot effect covers the staged showroom in detail, and a personal uniform is a good defense against the head-to-toe mannequin.