Duh! science

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer business section has this story across the top...

Shopper study: Do smells sell?
By Stacey Burling, Inquirer Staff Writer

Now I'm not ragging on the writer of the piece, but this just strikes me as one of those "Duh!" items that we all too often see or hear in the news. Here's the gist of it:

You can't stop time, but you can use scents to change the way shoppers perceive it, a West Chester University marketing professor has found.

"Shoppers"—actually students engaged in a shopping experiment—underestimated the amount of time they spent shopping by 26 percent when exposed to the pleasant aromas of clementine and vanilla. They overestimated it by 40 percent when the room smelled of galbanum, a vile aroma that reminded the professor, Jack Gault, of a combination of skunk and rancid oil.

If shopping time is money, then stores likely will benefit from good smells and suffer if there's a stench, Gault said.

"The longer they can keep you there, the more money they make," he said. "If you've got a bad odor in your building, your customers are not going to stay very long."

Uh, ok. So people don't find the combo smell of skunk and rancid oil pleasant? Who knew? I mean, did someone really have to do an experiment to figure that one out? Alright, enough rhetorical questions already.

I find this to be even more of a "Duh!" than ads for medications where the benefits of the product are loudly proclaimed with "studies show...", but then as the ad is ending they mumble/flash some fine print legalese about "...when used in conjunction with a proper diet and regular exercise." So gee, you think maybe it could be the diet and exercise that provide the most health benefit and not the product?