Ethnography Results, Week 4

Group members include:
Chris Kam (myself)
Steven Hennessey

For our second day of observation, we chose to go back to Express. We intend to visit each store a few times so that we can get a strong set of data and hopefully flesh out any outliers, albeit this is a relatively small study. We went on a Saturday and it was very busy. The carnival is in the mall parking lot so there was a lot of foot traffic. This time we went with Steven's girlfriend, that way he could stand around the fitting rooms gathering data without looking too creepy. We were in the store for an hour.


Our data:
# of customers that walked in: 165
# of males: 74
# of females:91
45% male, 55% female


# of customers that purchased something: 36
21.8% of customers that walked in bought something
# of items bought: 108
3 units/transaction
# of coupons used: 22
# of males: 14
# of females: 22
61% of customers buying used a coupon

# of people that visited the fitting rooms: 81
# of males:25
# of females:56
31% male, 69% female
44.4% of people that visited the fitting rooms bought something


# of items total people brought to the fitting rooms: 261
3.2 items per customer brought to fitting room
females tended to spend 10 minutes longer in fitting room

It was a bit harder to count people today since there were so many people in the mall. We feel that we got a pretty accurate number though, and our similarity to our previous week's findings semi-confirm that. We had to take a lot of scratch notes and our system consisted of a simple 3-character string defined as: [sex][hair color][shirt color]. For example, "FBRW" is "female, brown hair, white shirt". We did this in order to see if the people purchasing were the ones that also were in the fitting room. Steven only took note of people that took things out of the fitting room after trying them on and I took note of buyers.


A funny aside, I think after a while the associates in the store thought that we were trying to steal things. They kept asking us over and over if we needed help and always had someone in our general area towards the end.