Shopping Books

Beautiful Danielle Sharp is not used to not getting what she wants. Now, that she has Don, the only thing stopping them from being together is the fact that he moved back in with his parents! Will Danielle's plans for the perfect romance blow up in her face, or will she finally have the man of her dreams?

Outstanding guide written by a woman who knows her stuff. I wish she would update this gem! I purchased this NYC guidebook in 1998 and although some of the info is out of date, it is still my constant NY companion. Hundreds of accurate food/price restaurant reviews, detailed maps, listings for specialty shops, clubs, hotels, hospitals, emergencies and literally everything you want to know in a book that fits in the palm of your hand. If there is an updated version I am not aware of, please email me.

We have owned this book for years. While the information is somewhat dated (given the books 15 year old publication date) this is still the most authoritative tome on the subject. The book is filled with endless discussions of marvelous food shops, their quaint histories and the interesting people who run them. If you love food and New York, buy it!

If you're the type of person who would rather spend money on outstanding food rather than plays and shopping, this book is for you. This tome will take you to the best food in the world.

The coolest part is that you will be walking through "non-tourista" sections of New York that most long time New Yorkers don't know exist!

You can't go wrong with this book. We've used it the last three visits to New York and are still amazed at what we continue to discover!

Colorful Stickers. Shopping Fun.

Being a total teddy bear lover, I adore all the P.B. Bear books. This is a fun sticker activity book to help children match shapes or words with stickers. You can read the story and find the stickers as you go along.

This sticker book teaches some basic concepts:

Shapes
Numbers 1-10
Colors

Lots of fun and extremely colorful as all the P.B. Bear books are as well. You might also enjoy: P.B. Bear's Birthday Party or any of the P.B. Bear books.

I have started collecting bears again! They are the cutest! These books are too!

Your kids will love them.

~The Rebecca Review

Recipient of National Parenting Center Seal of Approval and Family Review Center Gold Award.
This book is a must have for a parent to teach their child what to do if lost and how to get safely found. Helpful tips and play therapies included that reinforce the lessons and encourage discussion.

This book's thesis is that by making the process of shopping easier and more desirable, and the choices clearer, the consumer will buy more. That's very similar to the observation that Taylor made about manual labor. Make it simpler and easier, and more work will get done. The methods are remarkably similar. Measuring the actions that the person under study makes, and changing the environment and process to see how the productivity is affected. I think this work is an important extension of behavioral economics, and hope it will be applied to more areas of business.

Although a book like this could be written in a very technical way, the voice and perspective are quite approachable. Also, the book is written to be equally interesting to shoppers and retailers. I'm sure you notice a lot of new things about your own behavior and that of others the next time you go shopping.

I also thought that the book was a good example of the way that stalled thinking holds back progress. For example, without this kind of observational measurement of shoppers, most retailers would never know which shoppers leave without buying and why. Or, why some merchandising experiments succeed or fail. In both cases, there are opportunities to accomplish more, if you can only grasp how your own decisions and behavior are helping and hurting your sales.

One of the sections I enjoyed was an evaluation of why many book stores miss sales. I often notice the inconveniences mentioned when I am in a book store, and wondered why the stores persist in doing things that make the store hard to shop in. There's a lot of stalled thinking in the industry, which is why we are fortunate to have Amazon.com to help us.

The book does a nice job of discussing how people with different perspectives shop differently. You'll probably get a laugh or two when you find yourself there. Do you secretly dig a sample out of the lipstick or the men's deodorant gel? Do you browse and rarely buy in Laura Ashley or in a computer store? When do you look at yourself in the mirror in a store? When do you not even go into a store because you can see long check out lines?

Ultimately, almost everything in this interesting book is common sense. But chances are that your needs are not often well served in areas that are important to you in retail outlets. My favorite was the problem of people only having two hands, and all of the times that we need three or four to negotiate the retailer's set-up.

A particular strength of this book was that it also pointed out that behavior is subject to change, as social patterns and values change. Men's jeans need to be in areas of wide aisles or fathers pushing their children in strollers will have to choose between looking at jeans and abandoning their children. That was not a very important problem 50 years ago.

I have often noticed how much people like to sample things before buying them, and how difficult it is to sample in many situations. Do you really want to go through what it takes to take a test drive of 20 different cars in 20 different dealers? Probably not. Yet, I would certainly buy a car more often if I had an easier chance to try the new ones out. You are probably the same way.

The main weakness of the book is that much less work has been done in looking at consumer behavior on the Internet, so the findings will hardly surprise you. You probably noticed these things years ago, like sites that are hard to navigate, have no site maps, and won't let you use the forms to buy.

I encourage anyone who has an interest in being more customer oriented to read this book, and use it to reexamine what your customers have to go through to do business with you. How could you improve?

Eliminate your stalls that make buying from you difficult, and rapid profitable growth should quickly follow.

This book is an incredible resource if you are trying to figure out ways to feed your family a healthy nutritional diet in this day and age of fast food death traps. This book is full of web sites, books, and creative ways to make the change from the commercial, unpronounceable food in the labels to healthy choices nightly for your family.

It's a short easy read to a better lifestyle.

For any parent, grandparent or friend who has tried to explain homelessness to a child, this book will be an invaluable resource. It paints the picture of Rosie through a child's eyes, and shows the magic power of simple love. Makes a perfect gift for the child who is beginning to examine the world around him or herself and ask intelligent questions.

It's a good starting point. It lists many of the pros and cons of a lot of the ethical issues facing shoppers today along with a laundry list of sources to try. It goes through a lot of the modern controversies and points out the holes in the arguments for both sides. The only problem sometimes is the decision of how far to go and it does point out some of the pros and cons for the different choice levels.

Some companies come out quite well from the book, others not so well. The edition I read was from 2004, before The Body Shop was bought out or Nestle brought out it's Fair Trade branded coffee, and a few of the websites were out of date, but overall it made me think and read some portions out to those around me. Many of the issues will stick in my mind, but it's the kind of book you'd really want to read every few years to keep some of the issues fresh in your mind.