Comment by matham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matham | Hacker News Reader

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What you're quoting is their literature review, not their study. Their study was:

>... conducted in a medium-size store operated by a large, nationally known chain of supermarkets ... The study covered a nine-week period starting on January 28 and ending on March 31, 1980...

... M0=no music, M1=slow, M2=fast music...

...they measured (1) traffic speed (2) daily gross sales (3)...

...for (1) they found: traffic flow was significantly slower with the slow tempo music (Ml mean = 127.53 seconds) than for the faster tempo music (M2 mean = 108.93 seconds) ... Ml stimulated an even slower pace than no music (a mean of 127.53 seconds for Ml compared to a mean of 119.86 for Mo), although not statistically significant...

...for (2) they found: The higher sales volumes were consistently associated with the slower tempo musical selections while in contrast, the lower sales figures were consistently associated with the faster tempo music (MI mean = $16,740.23 compared with M2 mean = $12,112.85). This difference is significant...

I don't have Jstor access so can't read the study, but does this consider the intended demographic of the supermarkets?

Just some thoughts off the top of my head:

I would imagine that clients with a higher median age in general prefer slower music.

I would also imagine that clients with a higher median age in general are more affluent (or more likely to be shopping for more than one person).

As a result, I would expect spend to be higher in areas with an older customer base.

Managers with an older customer base would likely select music that appeals to their customer base, likely slower music. Shoppers who do not like the manager's music taste may opt to instead shop somewhere where the music is more in line with their own tastes, so I'm not sure that the independent variable here can be properly controlled.

Therefore, the study may actually be finding a correlation which depends rather on the affluence of the community, rather than what they purport to have discovered.

From the study:

> It became imperative to develop an operational definition for the music variables slow tempo and fast tempo; that is, how slow is slow and how fast is fast? To answer this a sample was selected at random from the trading area of the supermarket. Subjects were chosen to reflect the age, sex and other relevant socioeconomic characteristics of the store's customers. Each subject was asked to listen to several instrumental musical arrangements and to classify them as slow, fast or somewhere in between. A total of 95% of the subjects classified musical selections with a tempo of 72 beats per minute or fewer as slow. Selections with a tempo of 94 beats per minute or more were classified as fast. Thus, the range from 73 to 94 beats per minute was considered between fast and slow, although this category was not directly a part of this study. Therefore, based on these findings, slow tempo music was defined as having a tempo of 72 beats per minute or fewer, an average of 60 and a standard deviation of 6. Fast tempo music was defined as having 94 beats per minute or more, an average of 108 and a standard deviation of 7.

> However, perceptions of slow and fast may vary across geographic regions or demographic parameters and therefore, the reader must be cautioned against generalizing these findings too far beyond the scope of this study.

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