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wife of a Mexican diplomat who had decided to buy some fancy music boxes as gifts to take home with her. The boxes were expensive, and she was buying about a dozen of them, for a total sale of close to $9,000. She needed to pay quickly, before intermission ended, and she had to arrange to have the boxes delivered to her. There was also the matter of having sales tax waived owing to her diplomatic status. A complicated transaction, to say the least.
    But this had to wait while the clerk handled the transaction with the teenage girl, who had arrived at the register first bearing her selection—a ballerina pen.
    It was clear even to an academic like me that the cash register procedure could stand a little reorganization and clarification. These two transactions should not be competing for the same clerk’s attention. And then the lightbulb clicked on. Why not take the tools of urbananthropology and use them to study how people interact with the retail environment?
    Years earlier I had witnessed an argument between the esteemed sociologist and author Erving Goffman and Jack Fruin, the chief engineer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who was at that moment in the midst of a gigantic undertaking, the planning and construction of Newark International Airport. Jack was expressing his emphatic frustration with the world of academia; he had attempted to hire some scholar-experts to guide his engineers and architects in their work, but instead of the clear-cut advice he had hoped to receive, he was getting buried under the academics’ typical inability to assert any fact, no matter how small, that hadn’t been completely proven by research. Goffman held the intellectual high ground in their argument, but at one point I clearly remember thinking, I’d have a lot more fun working for Jack than for Erving. Erving’s hiding in his ivory tower. Jack is out there doing stuff.
    Not long after the Lincoln Center assignment, I was sitting with some friends at a nightclub in Greenwich Village. One of the guys at our table was a young executive with Epic Records, a division of CBS, and I described to him my bright idea of measuring what happens in stores—the thought that there might be something worth learning by turning scientific tools on shopping. And over the course of a few beers my idea must have sounded interesting, because the guy said, “Why don’t you send me a proposal?”
    Full of ambition the next morning, I rose early, dragged out my manual typewriter and drafted a plan. I sent it over quickly, then waited. For, oh, about a year. Of course I tried writing again and telephoning during that time, but no one ever returned my calls. These were the dark ages of the science of shopping, remember.
    And then, out of the blue, I heard from a woman who was in charge of market research for CBS Records. She said that they had found my proposal in a dusty file somewhere and were all quite fascinated by it, and was I still interested in studying a record store?
    Sure, I said, inwardly rejoicing that a major American corporation was actually going to underwrite—to the tune, I think, of about $5,000—my research into the habits of the modern shopper. Iimmediately called a few of my students, assembled some notebooks and time-lapse cameras, and made my way to a record store in a northern New Jersey mall.
    Now, nearly decades and close to two million hours of videotape and much personal observation later, that study seems almost charmingly rudimentary. But at the time, it felt as though the discoveries came flying fast and furious.
    For instance: In the late ’70s, when the study was being done, traditional singles—45 rpm records—were still big sellers. The store, wisely, displayed the Billboard magazine chart of bestselling singles near the racks of records, as a stimulus to sales. But our film showed that most buyers of 45s were adolescents—and the chart was hung so