The Green Man is an English country pub run by a smart, ironical alcoholic philanderer named Maurice Allingham. The pub is haunted by a wicked seventeenth-century scholar and murderer in the Faustian mode named Thomas Underhill. In his dealings with the supernatural dark side, Underhill also raised an evil spirit of the forest apparently made of tree parts, known as The Green Man, who rises again when Allingham tries to sort out the skeletons in his closets.
Is there a method to our madness when it comes to shopping? Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a Sherlock Holmes for retailers," author and research company CEO Paco Underhill answers with a definitive "yes" in this witty, eye-opening report on our ever-evolving consumer culture. Why We Buy is based on hard data gleaned from thousands of hours of field research–in shopping malls, department stores, and supermarkets across America. With his team of sleuths tracking our every move, Paco Underhill lays bare the struggle among merchants, marketers, and increasingly knowledgeable consumers for control.
