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.
True. My point was, however, not to oversimplify but to highlight how a rather trivial concept is given a smart sounding name here, to make it appear sophisticated.
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. :)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.."
> 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.
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.
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...
...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.
> 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.
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
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
184 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadIs it just about clocks and hanging or not hanging them?
Can the same effect occur without a clock involved?
Does it describe something related to time perception and psychology, more general than Malls and their clocks?
Is this Mall case just one specific example of that type of thing?
If yes, then perhaps the more abstract name is more fitting.
Be aware that you too are fooled by it.
Remind yourself of the above in the situation.
Not perfect, but should go a long way.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSCRifY0H3Y
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...
With the debunking of "Thinking fast, and slow" this branch of psychology has hopefully run its course.
> 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.
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.
https://youtu.be/Ja2fgquYTCg?feature=shared
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.
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.
fMRI studies are largely bullshit in the best of times. Using it to study an abstract effect is doubly so.
> 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.
This study, for example, is quite telling:
https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgD0DkS7l6A
I guess I’m in a minority, I can’t remember the last time I went to a mall to buy anything.
Sociology studies are such a joke.
Things (like) this set off (my) suspicion radar.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
walking up and down in aisle 5
What store was it?
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.
>... 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
Who selected the station?
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.
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.
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)
Thankfully there is no cell reception at our local ski mountain, so nobody carries a phone, and clocks are prominent.
(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
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.
They're easy to break in a fall, the cold kills the battery, and the feeling of freedom from not having one is magical.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsby_Water_Clock
The enclosing Westfield shopping centre is in two halves, and the clock is between them.
You almost always see a Simplex Clock in each American classroom. 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 ;).
Even you probably have a clock on the microwave and the coffee machine in the kitchen :)
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.
And in age when everybody carries a cell phone, how important is a clock?
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 always figured it was partly to avoid the clocks and keep you in the fantasy.
After the casinos were saturated, the enforcement changed.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-sl...
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
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.
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.
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