If you’ve ever worked in retail, you’ll know this scene well. A customer walks up to the counter and asks where a particular stock item is, only for it to be sitting quite literally in front of their nose.
We have an upstairs area devoted entirely to children’s books, games and activities. There are little footprints on the carpet leading to the stairs, a sign directly above the door and, if all else fails, our staff happily point in the correct direction. Yet somehow people can still stand at the entrance and ask how to get upstairs.
It’s one of retail’s enduring mysteries. Not because people aren’t clever, but because brains are funny things. We tend to look for what we expect to see rather than what’s actually there. Add a bit of distraction, holiday mode and sensory overload and suddenly the obvious becomes remarkably invisible.
Retail staff everywhere will understand - sometimes customers aren’t lost at all. Their eyes have simply gone on a short tea break.
So I decided to do a bit of digging into this phenomenon to see if there was actually some science behind it, or if we retailers simply aren’t making things obvious enough. Turns out, it’s a real thing, called ‘inattentional blindness’. The brain looks for patterns not objects. People don’t scan shelves like a barcode scanner. They look for what they expect to see. If an item isn’t where they imagine it should be, the brain can skip straight over it.
And let’s be honest, retail shops are busy places. Covers, colours, signs, displays, gifts and shelves all compete for attention. The brain has to filter heavily to avoid overload - and sometimes filters out the very item being sought.
So what can we do to help prevent this happening? We have to think like a first time visitor. Will they see that one sign, or do we need to add two or three more cues?
The irony is that preventing inattentional blindness is less about making people look harder and more about making the shop easier to understand at a glance. Retail is really part merchandising, part psychology and occasionally part treasure hunt.
