How outlet malls rip us off: an excerpt from “Cheap,” by Ellen Ruppell Shell

The following is an excerpt from Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, out this month.

I had come to Vegas to gamble, though in truth the casino was only a detour. My mission was to check out the retail gambit, which in Vegas seemed just as dicey as the slots. Scores of stores circle the hotel lobbies, and hundreds more line the Strip, hawking everything from tattoos (“Fresh needles for every new customer!”) to Chopard Haute Joaillerie watches with an optional diamond wrist strap. It is terra incognita for a bargain hunter, but fortunately I had a guide: Gillian Naylor, a professor of marketing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Naylor’s paper, “Price and Brand Name as Indicators of Quality Dimensions for Consumer Durables,” in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, had alerted me to her expertise in connecting the dots of brand name, price, and consumer perception. Our destination today was a premium outlet mall.

The New York Times once reported that outlet malls were not only the fastest growing segment of the retail industry but one of the fastest growing segments of the travel industry. The total distance that Americans travel to outlet malls each year equals 440,000 circumnavigations of the globe. If that number seems a little abstract, consider this: The distance to the moon is roughly equal to 10 trips around the globe. That is, we make 44,000 moon launches’ worth of outlet visits each year. And all for what?

Factory outlets and Las Vegas casinos both play on the natural human desire to “beat the house.” The difference is that when we lose in Vegas we know we’ve lost. At the outlets, our desire for bargains can blind us to what we really want, which is value. We believe we’ve won—no matter how badly we lose.

People travel celestial distances to outlet malls because until recently outlet malls were located celestial distances from people. On the surface this makes no sense; as a rule investors won’t put money into malls without the requisite “threshold population densities” that all but ensure sales. But outlet malls are different. Resolute in their remoteness, they stand secure that, like Muhammad and the mountain, the customers will come to them. The remote location of outlets is not merely a defensive, cost-saving maneuver. It is also a deliberate strategy. In the public mind, convenience is a trade-off for price, and price is traded off for convenience. Inconvenience connotes cheap, while convenience connotes pricey. In a very real sense, outlets are the anti-convenience store. Visiting the outlets demands an investment in time, deliberation, and energy beyond what we invest in most other leisure activities. We have to work to get there, piling up hefty “sunk costs.”

All that time! All that gas! Psychologically speaking, all this and more must be repaid in the form of purchases made. In making that long trip to the mall we are actually engaged in a transfer of power from ourselves to the outlet itself—it has already extracted a price from us. Our expectations are raised at the same time that our guard is lowered, and in making this bargain we are willing to forgo many things that we once demanded from a satisfying shopping experience: variety, serendipity, aspiration—and fun.

Navigating Las Vegas Premium Outlets was anything but fun: 435,000 square feet of brand-name storefronts lined up in standard mall formation like so many dominos. There was no place to sit, and most customers looked exhausted and not what you’d call fashion forward. Though not all were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with slogans, enough were to make Naylor, decked out in a Diane Von-Furstenberg style wrap dress accented with a stunning Plino Visona handbag, a true standout.

A single mother of three, Naylor knows a thing or two about value. On our 20-minute drive to the mall, she mentioned that her youngest daughter, a high school senior, was mulling over her college choices. Naylor had constructed a spreadsheet of public universities offering the best value for the money and had given her daughter a choice of the top three.

Tags: fashion, money, shopping

Ellen Ruppel Shell is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly magazine and has written about science and medicine for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, National Geographic, Time, Discover, and the Boston Globe. Shell is a professor of journalism at Boston University, where she codirects the graduate program in science journalism.

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