Making A Mess

Give this article from Get Elastic a read. In particular, enjoy this quote:

• My first retail job was selling shoes in the mall. When the mall was “dead” and the store empty, we would begin to make a mess. We’d pull shoe samples off the shelf and throw them all over the floor. The idea was people browsing the mall are more likely to enter a store with activity than one where the sales girls are leaning over the counter tapping pencils and blowing bubble-gum.

Somewhere in our "best practices" world, we stopped trying to sell, we stopped trying to create demand.

Modern e-commerce would never disrupt the online store in the way that a retail employee would willingly make a mess of the physical store.

Best of all, this stuff can be tested. We can "make a mess", and then see if making a mess increased sales.