There is a couch outside the fitting rooms at nearly every mall in America, and for decades it looked like the least productive real estate in the building. No inventory. No margin. Just someone’s better half sitting with a pile of bags and time to kill. Paco Underhill, who has worked with shopping malls in more than 30 countries and wrote the 2004 book Call of the Mall, coined a phrase for it: “a parking lot for two-legged pets.”
“A two-legged pet could be a boyfriend, or it could be your mother, or it could be a grandfather,” Underhill, often called the “godfather of retail anthropology,” told Fortune. Give that companion a couch, he said, and the shopper they came with may stay longer.
