Taking your watch and telling you the time

Just a bloglet today – a more substantial post will be arriving soon.

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I subscribe to Get Abstract (registration required) which provides 5-page abstracts of business books, allowing me to keep up with trends without spending my entire life reading books. Usually I find it very useful. But today I received an abstract that included the most banal statement ever.

I received the abstract of “Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing” by Herb Sorensen. Here is a quote:

Studies of shoppers’ behavior show … “Trips always start at the entrance and end at the checkout [or] exit.”

Well DUH !!!

As somebody who has spent a large proportion of his career as a management consultant, I am often accused of selling snake oil or taking a client’s watch in order to tell him/her the time. But never have I been accused of stating the obvious in this way.