Extreme Shopping: Customers Hold On for Dear Life!
Corbis
With its chapel and theme park the Mall of America in Minnesota used to be the ultimate shopping mecca. But now a new slew of over the top retail experiences are putting the mega mall to shame. Call it extreme shopping.
Take the North Face pop-up shop in South Korea, where customers browsing the racks suddenly have the floor disappear underneath them. They’re forced to grab onto the walls—which just so happened to have rock-climbing holds. As they cling to the wall, a North Face item descends from the ceiling (just out of their reach)—as does a clock informing them they have 30 seconds to grab it. Most of the shoppers happily fling themselves at the item and it turns out the floor below offers a soft, pillow-y landing.
In the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, there’s an indoor ski resort that includes the world’s first indoor black run—a hardcore diversion that has turned the shopping center into more than just a place to buy luxury goods. The British fitness wear chain Sweaty Betty hosts weekly exercises class like kick boxing and yoga in their shops. AtHointer, a menswear clothing shop in Seattle, customers interact with a completely robotic sales staff. You download an app, go to the showroom, and scan the QR codes of the clothing you’d like to try. They’re delivered automatically to your dressing room, and when you’re ready to purchase something all you have to do is swipe your card using a tablet.
B. Joseph Pine II, co-author with James H. Gilmore of The Experience Economy, told BloombergBusinessweek that these experience-based retail stores can be good decisions for the brands. ”Experience means to spend time and, increasingly, to spend money,” he said. “If retailers just provide a completely mundane experience, people won’t come.”
However, some extreme retail experiences fail to bring in the customers. In 2005, Vans, a Los Angeles-based sneaker retailer, closed its 11 mall-based skate parks, including a massive 60,000-square-foot one that featured an off-road bike track at the Ontario Mills Mall in California. Sometimes, customers simply just want to shop for sneakers.
