You almost never see a clock at the mall | Hacker News Reader

You almost never see a clock at the mall

thehustle.co

193 pointsbrycehalley178 comments

From the article:

> Retail stores also use sound and music to manipulate the environment. A study from the early 1980s showed that slow-tempo music led to shoppers moving more slowly through the store and spending more money than if fast-tempo music played.

I wonder how big this sample size was. The linked study is locked behind a login. The public page indicates maybe it was only 52 stores and it was done by surveying the managers of the store. They even explicitly mention it was a "belief". Too bad the next few sentences are behind a login because it sounds like that would shed more context.

One of the local grocery stores here will play a bunch of 80s hits. They play Eye of the Tiger regularly. That song is one of the most purpose driven songs ever. If you had a mission to pick up 7 items in your list you can be sure you'll be done in record time.

I will say this though, I've absolutely stayed longer in a store because I wanted to wait until I heard a specific part of a song but that feeling is completely unrelated to buying things.

> One of the local grocery stores here will play a bunch of 80s hits. They play Eye of the Tiger regularly. That song is one of the most purpose driven songs ever. If you had a mission to pick up 7 items in your list you can be sure you'll be done in record time.

As somebody who likes to finish their grocery shopping quickly, I picture myself in a video montage with that song as the soundtrack.

Sidenote: I felt old when I heard Gangsta's Paradise being played in a grocery store about 10 years ago.

Been spending most our lives

walking up and down in aisle 5

> I felt old when I heard Gangsta's Paradise being played in a grocery store about 10 years ago.

What store was it?

A Metro (or maybe it was still A&P) in London, Ontario.

It won't be long until Nine Inch Nails starts playing at nursing homes.

I want to bingo like an animal

A bit apt. Toenails can be hard to get at when you're old.

Having worked in one in the past, I have been thinking about this a lot. The one that i was at, just before COVID, had a single computer for all the residents which was a little bizarre.

The rest of environment and recreation programs will have to adapt.

Aging millennials will probably demand things like game consoles, coffee drinks, meals like sushi and actual exercise equipment.

Current nursing home setup are so incompatible with incoming generations, it will be a flurry of activity to adapt.

I'd be surprised if I heard Lost in the Supermarket by The Clash.

What you're quoting is their literature review, not their study. Their study was:

>... conducted in a medium-size store operated by a large, nationally known chain of supermarkets ... The study covered a nine-week period starting on January 28 and ending on March 31, 1980...

... M0=no music, M1=slow, M2=fast music...

...they measured (1) traffic speed (2) daily gross sales (3)...

...for (1) they found: traffic flow was significantly slower with the slow tempo music (Ml mean = 127.53 seconds) than for the faster tempo music (M2 mean = 108.93 seconds) ... Ml stimulated an even slower pace than no music (a mean of 127.53 seconds for Ml compared to a mean of 119.86 for Mo), although not statistically significant...

...for (2) they found: The higher sales volumes were consistently associated with the slower tempo musical selections while in contrast, the lower sales figures were consistently associated with the faster tempo music (MI mean = $16,740.23 compared with M2 mean = $12,112.85). This difference is significant...

I don't have Jstor access so can't read the study, but does this consider the intended demographic of the supermarkets?

Just some thoughts off the top of my head:

I would imagine that clients with a higher median age in general prefer slower music.

I would also imagine that clients with a higher median age in general are more affluent (or more likely to be shopping for more than one person).

As a result, I would expect spend to be higher in areas with an older customer base.

Managers with an older customer base would likely select music that appeals to their customer base, likely slower music. Shoppers who do not like the manager's music taste may opt to instead shop somewhere where the music is more in line with their own tastes, so I'm not sure that the independent variable here can be properly controlled.

Therefore, the study may actually be finding a correlation which depends rather on the affluence of the community, rather than what they purport to have discovered.

From the study:

> It became imperative to develop an operational definition for the music variables slow tempo and fast tempo; that is, how slow is slow and how fast is fast? To answer this a sample was selected at random from the trading area of the supermarket. Subjects were chosen to reflect the age, sex and other relevant socioeconomic characteristics of the store's customers. Each subject was asked to listen to several instrumental musical arrangements and to classify them as slow, fast or somewhere in between. A total of 95% of the subjects classified musical selections with a tempo of 72 beats per minute or fewer as slow. Selections with a tempo of 94 beats per minute or more were classified as fast. Thus, the range from 73 to 94 beats per minute was considered between fast and slow, although this category was not directly a part of this study. Therefore, based on these findings, slow tempo music was defined as having a tempo of 72 beats per minute or fewer, an average of 60 and a standard deviation of 6. Fast tempo music was defined as having 94 beats per minute or more, an average of 108 and a standard deviation of 7.

> However, perceptions of slow and fast may vary across geographic regions or demographic parameters and therefore, the reader must be cautioned against generalizing these findings too far beyond the scope of this study.

According to at least one store manager interviewed in Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, the employees at the store are responsible for selecting music because they're the ones who have to listen to it all day. There isn't a lot of deeper thought going into it.

it's not quite that simple, because stores play music they have licensed. And of course during the holiday season the employees are subject to a lot of songs they most likely never want to hear again, like the prolific Mariah Carey and Wham songs.

Yeah this depends a lot on the store.

I know trader Joe's employees can pick the music, but they have a reputation as being employee friendly. When I worked at a low end grocery store we had no say at all and just got whatever they sent to us.

We did however sometimes hijack the PA system after hours and play whatever we wanted over that.

that depends entirely on which store you're talking about. the store i used to work at, for example, would simply put the radio on, while a store next door was run like this

> the store i used to work at, for example, would simply put the radio on

Who selected the station?

the owners

N=1, I've definitely tried to work in coffee shops during the christmas period that played the same obnoxious christmas songs on a loop to drive the customers out.

I remember someone telling me this about McDonalds when I was a teenager. I went to a store and listened carefully, it was just local radio. Sounds like a myth.

Radio is basically illegal to play in public due to licensing, so most chains would not want the liability. Not saying it doesn’t happen, just that that franchisee was playing chicken with a copyright infringement lawsuit.

> One of the local grocery stores here will play a bunch of 80s hits.

I remember once where the local mall played Foule sentimentale by Alain Souchon, which has very anti consumerist lyrics... Made that grocery shopping trip quite ironic.

It definitely falls into the category of “things I don’t believe work” or “things I don’t think work on me.”

I’m not going to a mall to be hypnotized into sleepwalking my way from purchasing opportunity to purchasing opportunity - I’m there to get in, get the stuff I came for, and get out. No matter if they’re playing fast music, loud music, holiday music, kids music - I’m not there to listen to the music. It has no bearing on the choices I make or the actions I take.

Very very hard for me to believe this stuff, it seems far too much like pseudoscientific magic to me.

> After 40 minutes, their brains effectively shut down. They struggled to make any logical decisions.

I'm dubious. I haven't read the study they take this conclusion from, but it does not accord with my experience of the world. Your brain shuts down after 40 minutes in a supermarket, really? Anyway, it's about supermarkets and not malls, and most of the other evidence in this article is about casinos. Thin soup.

The article says "Using MRIs to gauge". I've never seen a supermarket with an MRI. I have a seen a mall with an MRI, but it was more of an opportune space. It didn't face inwards into the mall concourse but was on the end.

So in other words, the study probably took people from a mall or supermarket after a set amount of time and MRI'd them in exchange for $25 or something. I really doubt they measured anything relevant here.

They put people in an MRI and then asked them to decide between various discounts and buy-one-get-one-free offers like they would face in a supermarket.

Because the experience of shopping in a super market or a mall is similar to laying in an MRI making all sorts of loud and disturbing noises? How they can even attempt to draw these conclusions is just farcical to me

Obligatory dead salmon study link: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...

fMRI studies are largely bullshit in the best of times. Using it to study an abstract effect is doubly so.

From your link:

> Some people like to use the salmon study as proof that fMRI is woo, but this isn't the case, it's actually a study to show the importance of correcting your stats.

MRIs are highly sensitive and can detect things that you wouldn't think possible.

This study, for example, is quite telling:

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

It’s not about what the MRI can measure but whether measuring within an MRI machine lets you extrapolate to real-world behavior in a totally different environment.

It's a mall, not a supermarket. Huge difference. Just look at these shoppers, and you'll understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgD0DkS7l6A

You (and I) are in the minority I think. The only time I browse a shop is when looking for a unique gift. Otherwise I go into the mall with a shopping list, get what I intended to get and leave. I don't think I've ever bought an item on clothing on a whim. I also can't stand casinos, I find the manipulative atmosphere disturbing.

> Otherwise I go into the mall with a shopping list

I guess I’m in a minority, I can’t remember the last time I went to a mall to buy anything.

Amen. I have also rearranged attempts at building a "maze" that deliberately waste customers' time. If I'm in a shitty enough mood, I'll move entire displays so I can walk directly where I need to go without detouring around them (when it's clear that they are only arranged to be an impediment).

Im pretty sure hell is simply a never-ending labyrinth of casinos.

If you follow through to the study, they displayed products on a screen to people in an MRI scanner, and asked them to evaluate the offers they were seeing. Unsurprisingly, after about 40 minutes their minds start to wander. Because in some warped researchers mind, being in the dark staring at a screen for an hour is exactly like being walking through a supermarket.

Sociology studies are such a joke.

The Hustle is also notoriously click-baity and loves to exaggerate so I’d take anything they write with many grains of salt and look for sources

You almost never see a clock anywhere

except in places where people aren't allowed to check their phones

(such as in schools or certain types of work spaces or a therapist office)

I don't have a phone, and it's always an interesting exercise to either try to find a clock, or ask someone for the time.

Thankfully there is no cell reception at our local ski mountain, so nobody carries a phone, and clocks are prominent.

There's a thing called a wristwatch that solves your problem.

Why not just get a watch at that point?

not whimsical and quirky enough

Anecdotally I wear a watch and the ski mountain is one place where it's a lot more convenient to glance at the clocks the bottom of the lifts.

I hate the feeling of something on my wrist. I used to have a pocket watch, but once cell phones became pocket sized I switched.

I am pretty certain of two things

(1) many still carry a phone despite not having cell reception because it is convenient and many use their phones to take pictures (2) many have an Apple watch/other smartwatch/dumbwatch on their wrist

I would still carry my phone into a place I already know to not have reception. I would want to check my messages when the phone does get signal and someone may have been trying to contact me. Also, it is reasonably secure on my person. Leaving it in a car or locker increases the chance it will get lost or stolen.

People still carry their phones on airplanes, even though we're not even allowed to turn on the cell antenna. Although now we have onboard wifi.

I assure you very few locals carry their phone at the ski resort.

They're easy to break in a fall, the cold kills the battery, and the feeling of freedom from not having one is magical.

>Although now we have onboard wifi.

Yeah, for a (steep) price. To me, it's generally useless.

But still I keep my phone with me for all the other reasons you state. When I touch down, I'll probably want to send messages to people that I've arrived safely, etc.

And at railway stations, although there are somehow never enough clocks at railway stations.

I suspect those may be to make sure passengers don't have an excuse for missing the train.

This article might have made more sense a few decades ago. They're no longer considered as expected as they once were

but also... my local mall, here and where I used to live, both have clocks

Our local mall has an 8-metre high 20-ton clock sitting in the middle of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsby_Water_Clock

The enclosing Westfield shopping centre is in two halves, and the clock is between them.

My god, what a glorious monstrosity! I live in Sydney, I may just have to take the train to Hornsby to see this farrago in person!

'Tis a sight to behold.

Las Vegas used to be a lot more strict about no cellphones (camera phones). As you were not allowed to take photos or video inside a casino. At some point the tsunami of every phone has a camera, and the Japanese tourists who take pictures and video everything sort of took over.

I always figured it was partly to avoid the clocks and keep you in the fantasy.

As someone who got thrown out for camera and video it was the thoughts of exploiting to cheat.

After the casinos were saturated, the enforcement changed.

There have been machines where the random number generator was predictable. The solution was petter random numbers.

It's a weird industry. I only know a little about it from a friend that worked for the gaming commission of our state...

But fun fact, the code (at least in my state) gets audited and one of the things they were doing even 15ish years ago was pulling EEPROMs out and running through a machine to make sure the final hash is an approved, audited progam validated to have fair payout logic.

State controlled - yes. Indian/Native American land or International waters? Not State controlled.

Indian/Native American land is still semi controlled by the US government. While they have a lot of leeway they generally are pretty good. They are making a ton of money and they know even a strong rumor of something going on would kill them.

Right which means when you realize there is a problem you can't fix it. Though the situation I'm thinking of (a topic here several years ago) was machines not used in the us.

This sounds like a valuable practice. I'd like to see limits on the retention of public surveillance video, and AFAICT the only way to enforce it would be something like this.

Like many things there are unexpected downsides. If a bug is discovered in these machines you cannot fix it without expensive work to get the next version audited. Often that isn't done which means if an otherwise good machine has a problem it is scrapped (or sometimes still used in hopes that nobody discovers how to exploit it - see the story linked elsewhere in this thread)

The above could include cases where someone intentionally slipped an exploit into code and it escaped audit. I'm not aware of this happening (and one of the points of audits is to prevent it), but I'm well aware of ways I can create an exploit that I wouldn't catch if I was an auditor.

I would not think that surveillance camera firmware would need revising much. Or that if it does, it's a rush job.

There was a big deal [1] about Russian hackers reverse engineering PRNGs in older slot machines and then scamming casinos for millions.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-sl...

Concert tickets in the US at least used to feature "NO CAMERAS ALLOWED" prominently. I forget exactly when that fell by the wayside but believe it was around 2010 or so.

Now it is frequently “No removable lens cameras”, which seems like a reasonable restriction.

In ye olden days it was supposed to be preserving the ambiance and protecting likeness.

In the modern (American) music industry people have realized that

* your average concertgoer phone shot video is too crappy to make much of an impact on that

* the whales who spend money on merch/etc at concerts will happily pay for a production quality movie of a concert regardless of the existence of these crap videos (e.g. recent Taylor Swift and Beyonce concert movies)

* at best these videos also drive the desirability of going to concerts up, boosting the main way artists make money

In countries like South Korea and Japan they still very much focus on protecting the likeness and so cameras are banned

Another factor is that hardly anyone goes to the effort of holding their phone for the entire time and recording the full show, especially for the Taylor concert which is well over 3 hours long. Now there were quite a few full recording of The Weeknd's ~1h20m After Hours til Dawn Tour.

> cameras are banned

This is not true. Big concerts in both countries are essentially 10k+ people standing on their feet for 2-4 hours holding mobile phones in front of their faces to take photos and videos.

I mean this probably depends on the group. But for example here is a forum discussion about how phone recording is technically banned for a BTS concert: https://forum.allkpop.com/thread/69555-no-phone-recordings-a...

>In countries like South Korea and Japan they still very much focus on protecting the likeness and so cameras are banned

They're not completely banned in Japan; it depends on the concert. At one concert I attended recently, cameras were not allowed during the concert, except during one song: they made an announcement that camera use was permitted during this time (while the musicians were walking around the arena during the song), so people pulled out their phones to take close-up photos of the musicians if they could. Afterwards, they announced that phones/cameras should be put away, and they were.

It's actually pretty nice: you can see much better without everyone holding their phone up, and then everyone still got a little time to use them for their photo collection.

This is still the case for nearly every stand-up comedy show i've been to. Now, for a concert, being there is a world of difference from watching it on someone's phone video and (less than stellar) audio setup.

I stopped going to bigger standup shows because of yondr (or whatever that cellphone bag thing was called)

From the article:

> No other industry builds a world designed to maintain a customer’s fantasy so that they continue to partake in an activity that, in the long run, advantages the house.

Videogames

Yep, there is even a lot of casino tricks in video games these days. I wonder if the casinos could take some lessons from videogames at this point? The battlepass and daily task rewards are both designed to get you in the door every day.

I like that they wrote this fine article, decided they needed to jazz it up a bit with some graphs, then decided to further make it pop by having seemingly the author pose as a topless DJ and a trumpeter.

I noticed this as well, but to me a mall is less like a casino and more like a simulated city - with notable exception of a clocktower, which is nowhere to be seen.

Early designs show this in detail, as they were more like sections of cities with skylights between the buildings:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_Umberto_I

Since ~2003 I didn't wear a watch, because I always had a clock with me.

But a decade+ later I wear them again, because the process of checking the current time on the wrist watches is one of the easiest[0] and less obstructive things. So if I need to track the time then I just need to have a vague idea of it in my mind and therefore I would just occasionally look it up and have at least some understanding of how much time I spent doing something. Well, most of the time. Doesn't work good in a bar, but still does work.

And for the shops/mall and whatever - just write a goddamn list of the items beforehand! Be it a paper list[1] or an app in your mobile clock you always have on you, you would check out the items in no time and (if you are living not in the US) you would even know how much you would spend on it even before you enter the shop.

[0] well, partially, because I wear black Axiom, heh

[1] I recently bought a thin pocket sized notebook (not moleskin! soft cover) and an automatic pencil. Yes, a decade+ later. The most amusing situation was recently when I needed to do some explanations, the notebook (14", an electronic one) was on the last breath, phone was on the charger quite far away and I just casually pull out that paper notebook and a pencil - my visavi just burst out laughing. The best part is what yes, the pen on paper did make the explanations fast and easy!

I just don't think there are very many clocks in public anywhere.

Sounds like "infinite scroll" (and maybe even "personalised feed"?) were anticipated well before the smart phone ("fondleslab") era?

I'm surprised tiktok/reels/shorts don't go fullscreen and hide status bar with clock.

>Retail stores also use sound and music to manipulate the environment. A study from the early 1980s showed that slow-tempo music led to shoppers moving more slowly through the store and spending more money than if fast-tempo music played. (There wasn’t a huge difference in results between slow-tempo music and no music at all.)

>“It’s almost mood maintenance,” says Theodore Noseworthy, a York University business professor who has studied the impacts of sound. “They’re trying to keep you in this positive state and almost in flow [so] that if you’re shopping, [you] just stay shopping.”

Dawn Of The Dead - Mall Music Collection / George A. Romero / 1978 / Horror Movie Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1NWcGZGD-M

>Unlike any other video on YouTube, this mall music collection provides all tracks heard within the Monroeville Mall in George Romero's 1978 zombie classic 'Dawn Of The Dead'. Finding the best quality for these tracks let alone their full versions wasn't easy. After a lot of research and editing, I give you the best I could put together. This cliché Muzak really makes the film what it is and captures a sense of slapstick comedy very much present in the movie. As far as I'm aware, these were real tracks heard in the actual mall back in the 1970s.

    TRACK LISTING (HEARD IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE): 

    1. Victorian Vintage
    2. Shopping Music #1
    3. Shopping Music #2
    4. African Drums
    5. We Are The Champions
    6. Ragtime Razzamatazz
    7. Tango Tango
    8. Fugarock
    9. Restaurant music
    10. The Gonk

(The Gonk is by far the zombiest: https://youtu.be/t1NWcGZGD-M?t=1051 )

A lot of the tricks described in the article are relevant to programmers trying to achieve flow state.

I have a cool clock I was going to put up in my apartment, but I decided against it because I sometimes have late night parties and the presence of a clock seems like a buzzkill for many of these same reasons. In fact, I'd even say that having fun and not knowing/caring what time it is go hand-in-hand. And anytime I need to pay close attention to the time is almost certainly a stressful time, not a fun one.

As far as shopping - a sometimes tedious chore - I welcome whatever social engineering they can muster to make it a more automatic experience. Same with casinos. I'm not there to be level-headed and use good judgement. I'm there to be joyfully manipulated.

The one kind of late-night party where you absolutely want a clock is a new year's eve party!

Some friends of mine often host such a party. They have an antique grandfather clock, which is ideal for this purpose. Except it's in poor shape, and usually stopped. So now a traditional element of the party is one of them standing on the arm of a sofa wrangling the clock at a few minutes to midnight, desperately trying to unstop the flow of time before we run out.

I want to know more about your demographic profile.

The concept of having frequent time-ambivalent late night parties as an adult with a job is absurd to me.

Do you have a trust-fund? Are you in your 20s?

I am in my early 40's and I live alone in Manhattan. Most of my friends are late-20's to mid-40's. Despite having very little wealth and absolutely no family money I am still something of a spendthrift, though I enjoy it.

The author is reaching. Casinos are well-known for this. As for shopping malls: they're close to being the answer to a "remember when?" question.

Like, "remember when you got letters from people you knew in the mail?"

Hmm.. where I live (urban Australia) shopping malls have gone through much the same process as hardware stores - the big ones have muscled out the small ones. But those big ones are heaving every time I go, even mid week during the day.

As a side note, my teenagers who are both very astute online shoppers will often go to the mall with no intention of buying anything, I guess for the same reasons as teenagers have always gone to the mall.

It's a little early to be calling the demise of the mall, imo.

That's kinda how it works in the US but the big malls are very quiet in the middle of the workday

not dead, but still not totally great:

https://www.resonai.com/blog/mall-foot-traffic

Also Australian, about 10 years ago my local council aggressively installed parking meters everywhere around the shopping mall and they have steadily jacked up the price ever since. Public transport where I am is crap, so driving is essentially the only realistic option. this has pretty much killed the entire area.

I used to live in Cheltenham UK, and one of the malls there had this clock as a feature https://www.regentarcade.co.uk/LocalInformation

I always see someone post that before Telford's: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-frog-clock

Ha, it's the same artist who did both, TiL.

Quite a few Japanese malls and department stores have very intricate clocks.

Closest mall to me. https://www.flickr.com/photos/alykat/179446667

This apply not only the mall, even in a museum, disco, party, crowds, time perception will be altered, i suspet the key is in the moltitude moving around the person, this can be distracting, dimming the simple original task we have entering... random observation: mall with sad music sell better than those with happy music.. and so on. And this work in large numbers, having thousand entering such environments and with a substantial part being less or more influenced.

This guy's entire post history is incoherent word salad from what appears to be a 1992 LLM bot.

Wow thank you for pointing out. It's definitely an interesting read

This is such a rude thing to say. He has a very idiosyncratic style and makes a number of typos or errors, but his posts are quite clearly understandable imo and much more apposite and interesting than LLM output.

"Interesting article. Maybe taxes on (some) capitals/property is (quite) equivalent to expiration. Money (value) accumulated that not contribute to development (probably) must be taxed, to enter it in the development cycle. But made it expiring seems a waste of value, decreasing it's value with time maybe is better, to avoid it, must be invested in something productive.."

Things (like) this set off (my) suspicion radar.

Sounds more like Engrish to me, but I did get what he wanted to say:

- It's not limited to malls and casinos but applies to many other businesses

- All the commotion distracts you from the task you originally had in mind when you entered the store

- The effect is seen in large numbers of customers, i.e. it's a statistical effect.

Quite right!... "Engrish"? :) like it.. so babel tower was not built in vain.

English not my home/mother/original language :)

I was without a phone for a month last year and it made me realize that there aren't clocks anywhere anymore. And if they are, they're not working.

I still see a lot of outdoor signs that alternate between showing the time and the temperature. They're usually outside banks, and near apartment buildings sometimes. Libraries probably still have clocks; they want people to know how close they are to closing time.

Might just be the city I'm in (Vienna). The city put up these huge pillars with big clocks all around town, but this weekend I was on the biggest shopping street in Vienna and the clock showed 12:00 at 3pm. There's a watch shop I drive by regularly that has a big clock next to their store sign and it just doesn't work.

I believe what the article explains is the reason why a plane ticket with a stopover is cheaper than a direct flight.

Airport are big shopping centres with captive and bored clientele. Even more, I find some airports (e.g. Gatwick in the UK) extremely oppressive. No natural light, closed space and the only way to escape is to expend money eating/drinking/shopping.

I don't think that's the reason. First, airlines don't own airports. So they don't benefit from your spending there. Second, they pay to airports directly (as in gate/landing fees) and indirectly by having to hire staff at the airport.

Flights with connection may cost less for various reasons. I'd think route optimization and price discrimination (direct is shorter and more desirable) would be the most popular ones.

I was once onsite at a casino for basically 7 days straight (barring trips off site for breakfast and some dinners) while working on a client project.

Not having clocks is one thing. Unlike a mall, the casino had zero natural light inside. Apparently, seeing that it's dark (or light again) outside might be a hint it's time to leave, and that's bad for business.

What about at a store selling clocks in the Mall?

I worked selling watches for a time in my life and we were instructed that every watch on display had to be set and stopped at 10:10. Looking that up it seems to not have been specific to just the company I worked for.[1] So, counter-intuitively, a store selling clocks at the mall might not have the time displayed either. :)

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

Fascinating. I don’t remember where I picked up the same habit of setting broken clocks to 10:10, but I do the same with a couple of grandfather clocks I own for sentimental reasons.

British comedian Dave Gorman claims the clocks are set to that time (actually 10.08 in his example), because that makes them look happy, and they sell better that way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSCRifY0H3Y

Mall stores aren't selling high-end timepieces. If the clocks are running, they will visibly disagree unless you pay somebody to handle all of the merch every day, time that could be better spent looking bored.

>Mall stores aren't selling high-end timepieces

Depends on the mall. I've certainly seen 5K and 10K timepieces in mall stores. In some places abroad even seen 100K timepieces next to high end clothing stores in malls.

>If the clocks are running, they will visibly disagree

Well, going the "low-end timepieces" case, the ones working with GPS or NTP time sync, like Apple watches and sports stuff will be on time...

Sure, there will exceptions to any statement such general statement. By and large the majority of mall-clock offerings are going to be of the low-end variety. And even when clocks are remotely synced, you still need somebody going through and changing the batteries. Much cheaper to just set them to 10:10 and leave them unpowered/unwound.

I'd be surprised if I went to buy a watch in a store and they handed me a dead watch. How do I know it even works? If they offered to replace the battery when I purchased it, I would take my business elseware, since I don't know if I trust their ability to change a battery correctly.

Nobody can demonstrate to me that 90 percent of what I buy works before I get it home. This makes little sense to me.

Interesting that I was talking about clocks, and you're talking about watches instead.

The most accurate timepiece is usually the one with a cheap quartz crystal mechanism lol.

They are correct twice daily. Frozen at 10:08!

Has the author tried the trick called free will

A store owner does a marketing survey to find out what kind of music customers might like. The narrative is that he turns on a mind control device that makes you buy 5% more.

With the debunking of "Thinking fast, and slow" this branch of psychology has hopefully run its course.

I assure you behavioral economics has not run its course.

That's pretty broad. I am referring to the style of analysis that heavily attributes slight environmental priming over all others factors (character, education, religion, mood, etc).

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" has been debunked? Could you provide a bit more context?

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" was written before the replication crisis was found. I wouldn't call it "debunked", but some of the research it used didn't replicate. For example, see https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe... :

> It is likely that Kahneman’s book, or at least some of his chapters, would be very different from the actual book, if it had been written just a few years later. However, in 2011 most psychologists believed that most published results in their journals can be trusted. [...]

> Kahneman also started to wonder whether some of the results that he used in his book were real. A major concern was that implicit priming results might not be replicable. [...]

Anyways, just google "thinking fast and slow replication crisis" to get a bunch of information about this topic.

I don't have links handy but the gist of it is that regular people do not automatically interpret questions asked of them in a technical manner (carefully parsing AND and OR logically), but instead try to intuit the asker's intent based on context.

So many of the studies concluded that the general population is unable to reason about trivial problems involving likelihood. However, when given more context about what's being asked, they absolutely can.

I pretty much quit reading this when I read "emotional part" of your brain. As if the brain has explicit distinct parts with complete barriers between them and that they are selectively turned on and off. We're not unemotional when making logical decisions nor completely irrational when emotional moments occur. If human consicousness were so simple we wouldn't bother studying it.

Marketing works because free will is illusory. Humans are not tht free agents they believe themselves to be.

I make choices of my own free will all the time. Also, marketing doesn't work on me (never has) so I'm not particularly impressed by the claims that it works.

Please allow Miranda Priestley to disabuse you of that notion:

https://youtu.be/Ja2fgquYTCg?feature=shared

You can tell yourself that, sure. But it is empirically false.

Ever heard of wristwatches? Or phones that show the current time prominently on the lock screen?

You rarely see a clock at the airport, even though most people at the airport is very interested in what time it is because they have a plane to catch. (I’ll concede that people who just finished the last flight of their trip might not care.)

Maybe this is a maintenance thing? If the clock is broken/wrong at a plausible time, you might not notice it until it's too late. Better to not have one and make people double check their own time.

This makes sense. (If it is indeed the case - see the sibling comment to yours, it’s possible I’m mistaken.)

Virtually all airport schedule signage (arrivals, departures) tells the time.

Which is to say that clocks are integrated into the most salient signage furniture.

The pervasive televisions also show signage, and at ticket desks there are often clocks which show international time in major destinations.

I hear what you’re saying. What I guess I meant - and I was not that precise - is that such clocks are usually small, a little display at the bottom of the arrivals/departures board. I should just be able to look up and know what time it is. Perhaps I am just unusual.

Erm: televisions also show time, was what I'd meant to write.

My first thought was about this title was how the mall near where I grew up had a centerpiece water clock that chimed and ran a special cycle every 15 minutes or so. Unfortunately they removed it when they renovated a number of years ago.

Just as well given that no two clocks in a modern town centre ever agree with each other.

Well anecdotally I did find it harder to find clocks in malls than other places, some years ago, at times when e.g. the phone was dead (and even in watch stores they're most of the times set at random hours)

> even in watch stores they're most of the times set at random hours

I can't imagine the proprietor showing, rather decisively, which of his products drift. Especially considering half the time, you can't tell how long ago it was set (within the current DST season or not), and so how much it drifts per day

IDK. I've been in a timex store before where they actually DID put the same time on all the watches. Of course pranksters would enable the alarm on a lot of those watches lol.

So, when i'm up late at night working on my side project, should I hide my system clock? Will this keep me in the zone for longer? I'd set some kind of alarm to avoid staying up too late.

The mall in my hometown had a giant fully functional clock tower at its centre. It would chime and you could hear it everywhere, too. It was pretty nice, actually.

The mall? These days I almost never see a mall.

And in age when everybody carries a cell phone, how important is a clock?

That feels like a 90s era insight. Nobody thinking about time looks around - they pull out a phone

I learned this line being about the casino. My childhood mall had beautiful clocks.

You almost always see an abandoned mall in an American suburb.

"Time is passing, are you?"

You almost always see a Simplex Clock in each American classroom. How about we remove them - what would be the effect?

> How about we remove them - what would be the effect?

It would eliminate the only reason kids have to _want_ to be able to read an analog clock ;).

The mall might be abandoned, but the tj maxx is still thriving and the psychological concept is the same.

They do have stores full of watches in most malls though.

Where does anyone actually see a clock nowadays? i haven't had a clock in my home since i threw out my digital alarm clock when moving in 2004.

I see plenty of clocks in people's homes. Libraries too. I don't think they're all that uncommon.

Hm i have a wall clock in the living room, one in my home office and one of those alarm clocks that project the time on the ceiling in the bedroom. Mind, the wall clocks are mostly decoration, it's only the bedroom one that really gets any use.

Even you probably have a clock on the microwave and the coffee machine in the kitchen :)

I just got one for my desk. Sure the time is on the corner of my computer screen, and on my watch and my phone, but I'm not wearing my watch right now and my phones are just chilling on my desk. I can see the clock from across the room.

I have a clock in my bedroom, too. It has a cute rainbow light frame that serves as a nice little ambient night light. Since the plug is behind my bed I unplug it when there's lightning nearby, and those nights I end up missing my clock.

tvOS hasn't had a clock until the most recent major release.

I might be in the minority but I love this feeling. Something about being in a casino and having no real difference between night and day intrigues me. I even looked into polyphasic sleeping (sleeping in small bursts) before I discovered it’s complete bullshit.

Same for casinos.

Welcome to the Gruen transfer.

Where do you see clocks?

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