This book is about the struggle among merchants, marketers and increasingly knowledgeable customers for control. With humor, insight, anecdote and lots of hard data, retail anthropologist Paco Underhill leads the reader through a journey into shopping heaven and hell. For those in retailing and marketing, this book is a remarkably fresh guide, offering concrete and usable advice on how to adapt to the changing customer. For the general public, this book is a charming, funny and sometimes disconcerting mirror of who we really are.